My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Doom scrolling
Quitting Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (really all social media) really helped. Lemmy is nice because there are not nearly the amount of comments.
Honestly social media does nothing for us anymore. It’s no longer serving its original purpose and is now a derivative version if MK Ultra level shit to feed us rage and sell us crap.
Cycling
I started biking to work after we moved closer and next thing I know I’m into mountain biking and have built 2 bikes
Woodworking! Yes, you can obviously spend lots of money on equipment, but you’d be surprised by how nice furniture you can build with just a track saw and a trim router.
Only thing that sucks about woodworking is unless you have a house of your own, it’s very difficult because of how much dust and noise is produced. Woodworking in an apartment is very frustrating.
My stupid ass thought I could maybe get into wood carving on a small scale… Checked the price of wood and noooope.
Playing older video games via emulation. The barrier to entry gets easier and easier as time marches on. And as long as you have disc space to download the games, you’ll likely find a repository somewhere on the Internet.
Anbernic handheld consoles are awesome and inexpensive.
I recommend the RG35XXSP. It’s shaped like a Gameboy Advance SP and plays lots of Dreamcast & N64 games plus everything below that.
$60 + Shipping Directly from Anbernic
or
$90 with free 1 or 2 day shipping from Amazon
Oh yeah some even let you play in browser now. Crazy how it takes seconds, and most peoples phones can even play most everything game cube and earlier.
You can also play at the Internet Arcade or Classic PC Games on archive.org.
