Instead of playing video games, I’m leaning frontend programming. I’m making a chatGPT movie recommendation assistant right now. Finishing projects supplants the dopamine hits I got from gaming.

• Cooking / Baking
• Crochet / Amigurumi
• Gardening
• Jigsaw puzzles
• Learn a new language
• Take a course

I always recommend roleplaying games like DnD or pathfinder as a hobby since it has a built in social and private element to it. You can join a group at most local game stores or by looking for organized play. Both Pathfinder and DnD have organized learning sessions where you can learn to play. Both allow you to start for free.

The good part is there is a regular scheduled social element usually weekly and between time you can do things yourself. That includes reading rules, making minis, practicing voices, writing modules, reading old source book, watching live streams, making maps etc. You don’t have to do all of those but you can really go in depth or as shallow as you want. All of the things you do my yourself will enhance the enjoyment of the group which is a great as well.

make a list of everyone that you would want to attend their funeral/wedding. and everyone that you would want to attend yours. come up with a realistic timeframe for yourself of how often you should connect with them, and set aside times in your schedule devoted to it. keep in touch.

If you played old PC games from like 1990s, dip your toes into that. Even if you didn’t, still go check out the old PC gaming scene.

Hit up GZDoom with mods, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Com Apocalypse, SimCity 2000 and 3000 Unlimited, Shadow Warrior, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, OpenTTD, etc.

Making things, learning things.

E.g.:

• painting

• clay/ceramics

• learn a language

• learn the history of a region

• visit a museum

• grow vegetables

• make pickles

• learn a weapon

• Try out recipes to cook from the internet. Thats an easy way to learn and in the end you can improvise.
• learn an instrument. Easier said than done really, best is to find a group and make fix appointments
• find a cool sport to do. Really, going out is sooo important. Dancing, martial arts, athletics, swimming, climbing, cycling. There is so much.
• learn another language that people actually speak in your area lol. For example signing! Signing is so useful, next to english, spanish, mandarin and russian maybe. Integrating deaf people is sooo important and it needs hearing people that can sign to translate.

Maybe try programming? It’s incredibly exciting once you get the hang of it. It can be frustrating at times but it’s really rewarding. Since becoming my hobby/job its given me an endless source of things to do at home. Plus it can open up new career paths :)

You didn’t rule it out, so my first thought is: play video games! It’s certainly on the line between consuming something and learning to do something. Some individual games can be a whole skill to study and hone for years (eg, learning a fighting game or a speedrun, etc etc)

Spirit of the question thoguh, that would probably be considered content.

Other ideas, most already covered by other comments: art, photography, music, writing, programming, cooking, woodworking, or learning a new language.

a few ideas:

Learn:
An instrument
A living language
A dead language
A fictional language
A programming language
A new sport
A craft
New recipes
Bodyweight exercises

Go:
To Hell (Hell, Michigan)
Hike
Powerwalk your local mall
Cross country skiing
To your local arcade
To the coffee shop
On a road trip
Walk all the streets in your city
Test drive something interesting
To a movie
To your local library
To a concert
To an art gallery
To a museum

Painting miniatures, 3d printing to make it more affordable in the long rune

Playing (optional) single player board games - picked that one up during the pandemic. I enjoyed some free print and play (or basic playing cards) games like:
Utopia Engine (both parts or expansion, whatever Beast Hunter is) - pretty much an exploration rpg? Very simple to setup and learn.
The Quiet Year - a map drawing game that gives you prompts to expand the map and lore of a small commumity/civilisation. Very peaceful.
Gridcannon - a single player puzzle/tactic game played with a standard deck of cards. Been a while but I enjoyed it a lot in pandemic times.

You can also play games like Gaslands or even Warhammer by yourself if you’re into that sort of stuff. I enjoyed gaslands by myself the other day :)

I’ll list some hobbies at the end but for me, I struggled feeling motivated after work to do anything but eat and be entertained. It got pretty bad until I decided I needed to figure out something different. I thought I was just missing hobbies but even as I picked some hobbies up (usually on weekends) I wouldn’t do them during the week.

Most of my issues revolved around stress (from work), turns out.

I still struggle with this so don’t expect a magic solution, but what I found was that my job was actually a lot more stressful than I thought. To the point where I’d wake up in the night thinking about work problems that for sure weren’t a big deal and that for sure wouldn’t be solved half asleep. So now I try and be more productive at work to make sure I avoid deadlines getting tight, and towards the end of the day I make sure my tasks are simple, if possible. I also try and take lots of breaks and I check in with myself “am I relaxed right now?” “would a break make me more productive” - and I unfortunately found that media isn’t a good break for me at work. Somehow the stress stays, while also adding in cravings for more dopamine-inducing activities. Good breaks for me include walking, actively listening to music, daydreaming, planning stuff (holidays, dinner, my upcoming evening, weekend), reading (pretty much anything), and learning new stuff (I’m studying Spanish and chess right now, recently learned all of my PLL algorithms on a Rubik’s Cube). I’m a software engineer for context.

The largest stress benefit for me has been biking to work. Yeah, I almost get ran over sometimes which is scary (even with bike paths 90% of my route, you still gotta cross roads, and even with a walk sign cars still won’t see you), but driving during rush hour is stressful (there are studies on this but I’m too lazy to link any). Biking is just fun. I even bike in winter (studded tires and poggies/bar mits). Since not everyone has the luxury of biking, exercising immediately after work is something to consider. It for sure helps me separate work from home. There’s plenty of studies on exercise lowering stress.

And if your job isn’t too stressful, there’s another issues with not committing to hobbies… For me, it was that I was/am addicted to media. Once I get started with some dinner and YouTube, it’s hard not to lose a couple hours. Best advice for easing out of it is audiobooks make it easy after eating to do chores/walk/not get more food. But other than audiobooks, avoid consuming media while eating. Also avoid media served by an algorithm. It’s so easy to watch a great video, and refresh the recommendations to look for another. Then you’re watching sub-par videos just hoping for a good one… Wasting tons of time. I use an extension to hide video recommendations. I can still search, and browse my subscriptions, but it saves me a lot of time (extension is called unhook I believe).

My username is actually centered around the idea that the more passive an activity, the less valuable it is to you. I personally want more active hobbies in my life. It is weird to me that so many fulfilling hobbies exist, but I regularly waste evenings on YouTube…

If you can have low stress and minimal cravings for YT/Netflix, here’s some hobbies:

• Get a dog (huge commitment, consider a cat if you’re too busy) but mine forces me on 3 walks a day, and I’ve love training her
• Learn something on your bucket list (I mentioned Rubik’s cubes, chess, and Spanish already), cooking has been mentioned by others
• I enjoy free diving (diving with goggles, but you hold your breath instead of scuba). I enjoy training my breath hold, and everyone thinks I drowned when I first go underwater at a lake or something (I can only dive for around 40 seconds but that impresses people (this includes swimming)). I can also dive pretty deep which is fun. It’s also a bit surreal to be deep underwater with good vision and be comfortable
• I recently dipped my toes into making music, I have a guitar, trombone, and someday I’d like to learn piano
• Having/riding a motorcycle is a great hobby. Seems like it wouldn’t be, but in summer I’m often looking for excuses to go ride.
• Bike commuting is great fun. Get some saddle bags to pick up groceries and enjoy the weather when you run out of eggs
• Mountain biking was the easiest hobby for me to dive completely into. Spent loads of money, built my current hardtail part by part. I’m even thinking about traveling south to bike in the winter cause I miss it so much. I live in a place with good trails close to home. Easy for me to go riding before or after work.
• Camping, Fishing, Backpacking, Hiking, Snowshoeing, Back-country skiing/snowboarding, all great fun. Make great weekend trips too. Go explore your state
• Check out letterboxing. It’s a bit like geocaching but no GPS, just clues/puzzles. My letterboxing journal always makes people ask questions
• My wife and I like getting hotels in small towns nearby (within 2 hours). We’ll walk the town, get food, and have a lot of free time to read or play board games, or other adult activities
• Read. I try and read a book a month. I find that reading before bed helps me sleep WAY better. If I go to bed early and stay up late reading, I think I sleep better than if I went to bed somewhere in the middle without reading.
• Write. I love writing. Sometimes don’t know what to write about, but even typing out how I’m feeling today and what I’d like to get done - and then deleting it - lifts my mood
• I’m into software, I run a homelab. Huge time suck. I love it.
• Video games. Might seem super passive, but I think I actually play less than I want to. For sure different than watching YouTube. Some games are challenging even. I have a huge backlog. Tons of fun to play with friends. My wife and I just started Baulders Gate 3 together
• Exercise can be great. I love running in good weather. Some friends of mine got big into cycling. My wife likes the gym. My favorite workouts are to run to the college track and then do body-weight exercises there (and practice my handstands) before running back. I also enjoy Yoga, but do a lot less than I’d like
• Board games/Card games - I enjoy Magic, but the company has made it hard to be a fan (same for DND). Flesh and Blood has been fun, but I haven’t played a lot of it. On the board game side; Starwars the deckbuilding game, chess, dominion, and cosmic encounters are all good. You’d be surprised how many people want to play board games. In the few game nights I’ve hosted we barely got to play anyone’s games they brought.

Adventure is out there. Don’t waste your youth. Some of these might not seem like ideal after work hobbies, but most are totally doable in an evening.

I got into designing crosswords for a while. It was pretty fun to manually lay out a sheet of answers and think up clues for them. Also, reading theory.

I did Taekwondo at one point in my life. It was super fun, because I actually felt like I achieved something (a belt) for my hard work

I built a homelab.

Basically you buy some old enterprise server hardware (or, if you are smart unlike me, you build low-power machines from scratch!) and then you can run your own services.

Some fun stuff includes:

• Plex or Jellyfin or Emby - stream your own video library
• HomeAssistant - Control and automate all the smart things with little to no cloud connection!
• TrueNAS - file server storage for large share drives and local backups
• Grocy - Inventory management for groceries/supplies. Includes special features for batteries, chemicals/food with expiration dates, shopping list generation + barcode scanning, chore tracking (with automatic inventory of supplies like dish soap and laundry detergent), and recipes based on what you have on hand. Integrates with HomeAssistant
• PiHole or AdGuard Home - DNS-based adblocker. Any device connected to your network has a ton of advertising blocked at the network level, no plugins or installation required; devices simply can’t find the ad servers to connect with. (Can break stuff like Paramount+ or Hulu, etc but you can add exceptions)
• the “arr” suite - Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/prowlarr - fill up your Plex library with ahem legal backups of legitimately purchased media automatically over the internet.
• OPNSense - free, professional grade firewall with support for network-wide VPN clients. Put your entire house behind a VPN, allow VPN access inside your network from anywhere (get the benefits of PiHole on the go!), block shady IoT devices from seeing anything else on the network (Chromecasts, shady smart switches, etc), the sky’s the limit with this one
• Fediverse instances - Run your own personal Lemmy or Mastadon instance!

And tons and tons of other stuff. It’s not cheap, it’s time consuming, and the wife hates the power bill. But if you’re into doing shit with computers, it’s a damn interesting rabbit hole