Tag: hobbies

Health and fitness, Thoughts

On Loneliness

minceandskirlie

Let me start this by saying something important, I’m not actually lonely. I have a great family, good friends that I see semi-regularly, and work colleagues I get on well with. In technical terms I’m not alone. I get adequate amounts of social interaction. This article isn’t a criticism of the people in my life or a problem for them to solve. But still… I feel lonely a lot of the time and I think I should talk about it.

It’s strange talking about loneliness. As someone who tends towards being introverted, I’m quite happy spending time alone. Especially when I’ve spent a lot of energy in other social situations or doing something stressful. Time by myself, to spend on a hobby – strumming a guitar or playing a game in peace – lets me recharge the social battery and give me a chance to calm down a lot of the anxiety that I’ve struggled with in recent years. But that doesn’t mean I don’t value time spent with others. I just have a limited well of energy to draw from.

It’s not intentional, or even by choice, but most of my hobbies I now practice alone. I’m quite classically nerdy and have a lot of interests I enjoy – I like video games, collecting Warhammer miniatures, playing music on guitar and mandolin (switching between heavy metal and traditional folk), writing, and dungeons and dragons. For the sake of my physical and mental health I have a few ways of keeping fit that I also enjoy – running, cycling, and more recently, indoor climbing.

Almost universally, I do all of these things alone.

(the exception is D&D where we have a semi-regular online session. It doesn’t work well alone)

Now this isn’t really by choice. Take playing music for example, I spent most of my late teenage years and my twenties playing music in local bands, going to gigs and talking to friends about it. It was a huge part of my life and my social circle. But as tends to happen, you get older, you start a family, work gets more important and it just fades away until it’s not really something you do any more. I still play music, just for my own enjoyment, but it’s not really a big part of my life anymore.

It’s the same for gaming. Growing up we spent most of our time playing games with friends. Slowly as we all grew up and left home, that moved into playing online together. But again, that’s faded away as it gets harder and harder to arrange sessions and by the time the kids go to bed, there’s not much energy or time left to try and get a game going. So I don’t really bother. I still talk about games with some of my friends, but it’s not really the same.

Even the sports I do find time for used to be more social. Many years ago I did Taekwondo and really enjoyed the social part of training martial arts. I was an active member of a running club a decade ago. I loved meeting up two or three times a week in a carpark in the hills and then trotting round a cairngorm nature reserve for an hour or two. It was brilliant. Since we moved house I joined the local club here and have been to a couple of sessions a few years ago, but then the pandemic happened. Now things are more normal, all the club sessions clash with kids activities or their bedtimes and it just isn’t feasible to make it along.

Before we had kids, my wife and I started going indoor climbing. Both of us were terrible at it, but it was something we did together and it was good to push us out of our comfort zone. A few years ago I tried to convince her to take it up again, but instead I find myself going to the boulder wall on my own and struggling in silence for an hour or so. I’ve tried suggesting to friends that they take up climbing so I can do it more socially, but hanging off a high wall, gripping tightly to some small bits of plastic appears to be a hard sell.

Now I know all these things can be social. I realise there are other people at the climbing wall when I’m there. I could even try and arrange social runs at lunchtimes with other people in the office that go running. They exist, I’ve seen them. I’m sure I could talk to them and suggest running the same route, at the same time, at roughly the same pace. I’ve even joined discord servers for the video games I like where they have regular online sessions, which I could join in. But that introvert part of me just doesn’t know how to do it and then thinks I’ll just end up letting people down when I can’t make it.

I’ve got into the position where I have lots of hobbies. But none of my friends that I do see, or any of my family, share those hobbies. So anything I’m really interested in I don’t have a way of enjoying with other people. It’s that feeling of not being able to share your interests with other people that makes me feel lonely.

My evenings are mostly a write off due to family commitments, so I can’t go to regular training nights, or folk sessions, or spend hours a week climbing. I’m also studying for a part-time degree with the Open University on top of everything else. I don’t have the energy to figure out how to make it work.

I’m sure this is something that will get better as the kids get older, and rely on us less and less. Or at least I hope so. I’m sure as well that this is a common experience. We all pine for our youth and the things we used to do when life was more carefree and we had no responsibilities. I also know there are people out there scratching their heads at this and wondering why I make it sound so difficult. I do see people my own age, with kids and responsibilities, who cope a lot better with making time for themselves to do things with clubs or groups, or make time to go see friends etc. I’ve just no idea how they do it. Answers on a postcard please.

There we have it. I don’t really know how to end this. I don’t have a solution or a plan of action to change things. Basically I feel like I’m alone a lot of the time, even though I have lots of hobbies, because I don’t get time to do any of them with other real people, and the friends and family I do spend time with, don’t share many of my hobbies. Maybe I have too many and need to focus on just one of them to do more socially? It’s a conundrum. If I could solve it, then it wouldn’t be a problem I guess!

Thoughts

The downside of an always connected lifestyle

minceandskirlie

I’ve just finished reading an article by Jemima Kiss on the Guardian’s website which really resonated with me. Normally I don’t bother with the comment pieces on the site, skipping to interesting news, sport or the tech, food and culture sections as I spend my lunch time idly catching up on the world. However the title of the piece – Turning off technology is about mental wellbeing – not becoming a digital hermit – fell in line with a thought that’s been in my head for a while now. I used to be happier before the internet.

Now, in general I am quite a happy person. I’ve got a lot going for me including a nice house, wife and newborn child, friends and family; plus plenty of hobbies to occupy myself with. But I’ve found the last couple of years to be a struggle mentally in many ways, the independence referendum was a long emotional journey with a crashing comedown on the day of the result, my career has gone through a number of recent changes with added pressures and then there’s the big life changes that moving back to my home town and a new baby bring. That’s a lot of load to put on a person.

So where does the internet come into this? Why does it specifically make me unhappy when I can weather (mostly, I have my moments) those other pressures? I think it’s partly my own fault – having all that information constantly at my fingertips is too tempting. During the referendum I would be constantly checking twitter for the latest comment or news from the campaigns and as a result I spent most of last year feeling angry all the time. It’s not a nice feeling. Now with the general election I find myself doing the same thing. At least if I just check into the teatime news on TV I only shout at lying politicians once a day, that’s if the TV even reports what’s happening! There I go again…

The other big downer the internet inflicts is that it sucks time from you. I have a lot of hobbies, probably too many if I’m honest as it’s hard to keep up with them, but I really enjoy trying to things and learning new skills so I keep wanting to do more. The ones which get me outside (cycling, running, hillwalking) aren’t a problem; I’m outside, away from my laptop, tablet and often even away from a mobile signal. It’s the hobbies inside that suffer. I absolutely love playing music, writing and learning new songs, but I never seem to find the time. Or I sit down with the laptop to write something and find myself staring at reddit two hours later with a blank word document in another window. The same thing happens when I try to work on this blog, or some fiction writing.  I recently developed an interest in electronics and spent some time putting together some project ideas. Every time I think about getting the circuit boards out I run out of time, but I find plenty of time to sit on the sofa refreshing facebook and twitter or browsing Amazon for more hobbies to neglect.

It gets really frustrating. I know that spending an hour or two writing something new or making some progress on the Arduino powered baby toy I thought of would make me a lot happier for the rest of the day.  I’ve been a gamer all my life but my Xbox went untouched for almost two months, despite me making frequent comments about playing a game while the baby slept. I just never seemed to find a gap to fire it up, yet I spend literally hours at home aimlessly surfing the web.  That’s time I could be shooting terrorists! Or getting my arse handed to me by dragons in Skyrim. It stresses me out to know that I’m just wasting time like this and neglecting things that I genuinely enjoy doing.

Lastly there’s my friends and family. Now it’s natural that as you get older you grow apart from your friends. Everyone grows up, moves away, families are started, homes are bought and work pressures build. But I hardly ever see friends anymore or talk to them. We seem to be deluded into thinking we’re keeping in touch these days just because we saw some pictures of each other on our respective holidays or wearing a stupid jumper at Christmas. That’s not keeping in touch, it’s just nodding at each other from across the street if you happen to pass. Funnily enough as I write this I am actually going to meet up with friends this weekend for the first time in a while. In some cases it will have been months since I’ve seen them. They all live within an hour of me.

I lied when I said lastly… but lets not delve into the self-defeating acts of workplace procrastination the internet enables for me.

I think part of the problem is a kind of laziness inertia which happens after I get home and sit on the couch. Inevitably the laptop or tablet come out and I sit checking facebook, browsing reddit or other online forums while I have tea, feed the baby etc. Then I stay there. Before I know it most of the evening’s past and I decide there’s no point starting to do something constructive so I sigh and open up another tab in chrome or maybe I’ll get as far as turning off the laptop and watching an episode of Community on Netflix. By the end of the week I’m fully up to speed on which of my casual acquaintances still plays Candy Crush Saga on Facebook but have made no progress on any musical ambitions or finishing any projects.

What’s the solution for all this?  Before I was always connected to the internet I spent all my spare time doing constructive things like playing guitar, going to the pub with friends, playing video games or being terrible at football. I want to spend more time on the things I enjoy doing, rather than feel depressed because I can’t drag my sorry carcass away from twitter long enough to strum a guitar. Ignorance was bliss as I was unaware of all the underhand shit being perpetrated by politicians and other assorted scumbags the world over. Now I’m overloaded with conspiracies both real and imagined which force me to spend my time in a state of permanent outrage at the endless fuckwittery that’s out there. It’s really fucking tiring.

I could take the nuclear option. Delete the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone, and most of my bookmarks from Chrome. The problem with that is that I do derive some value from the interactions I have online and the internet is of some use as a tool for organising holidays, buying stuff and for learning about things.

I think the answer, like with so many things, is to impose strict moderation. I need to stop reaching for the tablet every time I sit down and push myself to live a life with more interaction in the real world instead of spending it online. Unless I have a good reason to turn on my laptop it needs to stay off.  Ah, but what about writing? I have to use my laptop for that (even I struggle to read my handwriting).  Damn. Maybe I need to dig out an old laptop and never configure it’s WiFi connection so it remains offline. Apparently George RR Martin does that. A Song Of Ice and Fire is written in Wordstar 4.0 on Dos…

If anyone has any better ideas, let me know.

Writing

Creative Writing

minceandskirlie

I recently flirted with the idea of doing a distance learning or part-time English degree but eventually decided it would be too time consuming and too expensive (especially with a new baby in the house). However I still wanted to explore a bit more creative writing and eventually decided that instead of putting it off I should just give it a try.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been putting together story ideas and writing some wee pieces of flash fiction and short stories. I’ll try and put some of it up on here in the future. It’s been great as a hobby that I can devote time to while still taking a shift looking after the baby. I type away at the table while she sleeps in her bouncy chair or gurgles away on the playmat. Other times I can read some of the community work at Scribophile.com and practice my critical eye by offering critiques for others (the worth of this kind of online community is hard to overstate, it’s brilliant!).

Last week I went along to the local community centre for a meeting of Stonehaven’s creative writing group. Before I turned up I had all kinds of mental images in my head of what the class would be like. To be honest most of them were pretty close to the reality but aside from that the class was also friendly, welcoming, supportive, non-judgemental and full of interesting discussion about literature and various other things.

We spent some time discussing a long poetry piece one of the group members have written. I found the standard was very high and everyone raised good points, both on the technical and emotional components of the work. Then we went through some short exercises to try and generate discussion and possible writing topics. These included a few poems on St George (as it was his day) and a task to list things we hate touching and list reasons why. Finally we finished with a review and discussion of a story written by the group leader based on a bit of his family history from Peterhead where it’s rumoured his ancestors came across a large chest of money washed up from the sea. He’d used this to write an entertaining and humorous piece with dialogue in broad doric telling the tale of the chest and the inevitable double-cross within the group that found it.

The conversation around this piece darted off in various directions in great detail. It was really refreshing just to be able to sit and discuss a piece of writing like this and go into the technical details as well as the broad themes and history which inspired it. I thought it was a great way to spend a couple of hours so think I’ll definitely be going back again.