For a lot of my life, I didn’t try too hard. I did the bare minimum to get by habitually and was a chronic underachiever. Early on in life I didn’t mind this lifestyle. However, there was a persistent emptiness on the underside of it that became harder to outrun as I got older.

About a year ago, I started writing. My thought was that, if I felt empty inside, then maybe there was a void inside of my soul. I thought that maybe the words I produced would be able to fill it up. At the very least I hoped that writing could provide a distraction. Some months later, I was proud of the pages I had filled with words, but the emptiness still lingered. Lately, it has been particularly bad, and I’ve been finding myself falling into rabbit holes online. I would sit down to look at something on my laptop, only to emerge five hours later bleary eyed and numbed out. I thought that consuming other people’s emotions, thoughts, and creations would make me feel less empty and alone. But in actuality all of this consumption just made me feel more isolated and numbed out.

I knew something needed to change, I just didn’t know what change I needed. I consulted therapists, friends, AI, and ten-year-old Reddit threads for the answer. What I got back was clear – I needed a fucking hobby. It was not enough to watch life pass me like a kaleidoscopic daydream while I sat in the passenger seat. I needed a realm where I had agency, creativity, and a powerful voice. I had tried to look for this elsewhere in my life and had always come up empty. Despite trying a number of different fields of employment, for example, work had always ended up as just a way to pay the bills for me. While I loved my friends, we were always brought together by a general shared humanness, rather than any specific passions. But overall, I realized I had been looking to find a life that would thrill me, rather than building a life that I was thrilled by. So, now it was time for me to start building it for myself. Hobbies felt like a space I could carve out where my voice and preferences were given priority. They seemed like the first brick in building a life I would be thrilled by.

But what to do? Like most adults, I had been worn down by decades of playing by life’s social scripts. I had swallowed opinions that might be controversial or difficult for others to digest for so long that I had almost forgotten who I was when no one was watching and judging.

I realized I needed to start not at step one, but at step zero. I couldn’t jump into a new practice, but would instead have to start an experiment with different hobbies I might like. So, I wrote a list of about a dozen different things that I thought seemed interesting. From that, I narrowed the list down to a manageable five: drawing, mixology, running, and coding. I am now two weeks into exploring these new fledgling hobbies, and I hope to write more about those specific adventures here in the future. For now, I wanted to say that this entire experience has already proven both exciting and engaging to me in a way I didn’t even know I needed. Even if none of these pursuits becomes a lasting mainstay of my life, I already feel like my brain has been enriched by trying them.

Oh, and trying new things in my mid-thirties has also been massively humbling. But, you know, I think that’s good once and awhile!