Lessons by subject

Lifestyle & Hobbies lessons learned through experience

Creative pursuits, sport, food, and simpler living. These are honest accounts of what happened, what changed, and what the writer knows now.

Latest lifestyle & hobbies stories

HNDSYT Original4w ago

Lifestyle & Hobbies

The Hobby I Was Embarrassed to Admit

I collect old railway tickets.For years I did not tell people.It sounds like a strange hobby and most of the tickets are worth almost nothing. I kept them in envelopes in a drawer. Some were from trips, some were given to me and one belonged to my grandfather.My daughter found them one Saturday.“What are these?”I expected her to laugh.Instead she asked, “Why do you keep them?”I told her I liked remembering where I had been.We went through the envelopes together for almost an hour.Now she sometimes brings me a ticket when she travels.Last Christmas she bought me an album for them.I still feel a little ridiculous when I explain the hobby.But I don't hide it anymore.It takes one drawer.It makes me happy.That is probably enough.

#lifestyle #and

The takeaway

A hobby does not need to be impressive, useful or profitable to be worth keeping.

HNDSYT OriginalJul 20, 2026

Lifestyle & Hobbies

I collected hobbies instead of practising one

I work late most nights. Last call is two, sometimes later if someone is being slow about it, and by the time I get home my brain is too wound up to sleep so I just sit there. I used to fill that time with things. Guitar for a while, I bought a decent acoustic and a book of chord diagrams and left both of them on the kitchen table for about three months before moving them to the closet. Then watercolours. Then I got really into bread, sourdough specifically, kept a starter in a jar on the counter and talked about it like it was a pet. Woodcarving. A second-hand road bike I rode maybe four times. A small notebook I was going to use to write things in. I do not know what things. It is still mostly empty, it smells a bit like the bar now because I brought it in once thinking I would write something during my break. I never did. The notebook is in my jacket pocket. I am wearing that jacket right now.

Glasgow, UKWhen it happened: 50-59#hobbies #habits

The takeaway

I think I liked the idea of being someone who did things more than I liked doing things. That sounds like an insight but I am not sure it is, it is just a thing I noticed. The starting part was genuinely enjoyable, buying the thing, reading about the thing, telling someone at work about the thing. The three-weeks-in part was harder and that is where I always seemed to lose the thread. I do not know if the problem is attention or patience or just that working until two in the morning leaves you with a kind of tired that is not about sleep, it is more like your wanting-things muscle is sore. Some nights I pour the last drink and I genuinely cannot think of a single thing I want, not food, not television, not anything. I just sit. Maybe that has something to do with it. Or maybe I am making excuses. Both things can be true.

HNDSYT OriginalJul 20, 2026

Lifestyle & Hobbies

I never took photos of ordinary life, only holidays

I had this rule I never actually stated out loud, more of a habit really. Camera comes out when something is happening. And for years I had a fairly confident idea of what that meant. Christmas. Beach holidays. Graduation. The camera stayed in the bag otherwise. I think I told myself it was about not being precious, not being one of those people who photographs their lunch. But actually I think it was more like I had this model in my head of what counted as a memory worth keeping and it was basically a highlights reel, a kind of mental JPEG compression where you throw out everything that isn't a peak moment. Which is, I now think, a deeply stupid model. But it made sense at the time and I never questioned it. I had a 16GB SD card with maybe four hundred photos on it going back six years. Mostly the same five or six types of occasion. There were whole years in there that were basically one birthday dinner and a week in Portugal.

Glasgow, UKWhen it happened: 30-39#photography #hobbies

The takeaway

I don't know if there is a lesson exactly. I think I built a mental model that was wrong and I used it consistently for a long time and by the time I understood why it was wrong the cost was already there. The model said: ordinary moments don't need recording. They'll always be there. But they won't always be there, obviously. Nothing is always there. I knew that abstractly. I know lots of things abstractly that don't seem to change my behaviour. I think the thing I actually took from it is more uncomfortable than a lesson, it's more like, I had a preference for not seeing something and I organised my habits around that preference and I called the habit something neutral like I just don't photograph mundane stuff and that made it easier not to look at what I was actually doing.

HNDSYT OriginalJul 20, 2026

Lifestyle & Hobbies

I let gaming quietly eat all my free time

I track hours the way other people track calories or steps. Client billing, commute times, grocery spend broken down by category. So eventually I opened a new sheet and put in conservative estimates. Maybe 2.5 hours on weeknights. Four on Saturdays. Multiplied it out across four years and I just sat there looking at the total. Didn't write anything in the adjacent cell. Just sat there. The setup was always the same. My partner would go to bed around ten. I'd stay at the desk. The flat blue light of the monitor. An empty mug I didn't remember filling or emptying. The queue would pop and there'd be a little sound and a button and I'd click accept, and that was sort of the decision made for me, which is probably the point.

Dublin, IrelandWhen it happened: 60+#gaming #habits

The takeaway

I still play. I'm not making a case against it. But I put a weekly cap in the same tracker I use for everything else and I check it the same way I check the others. Whether that's actually changed anything I'm not sure I can say yet. The data is only a few months old.

HNDSYT OriginalJul 20, 2026

Lifestyle & Hobbies

I abandoned a creative project because one person criticised it

I had been working on it for maybe eight or nine months. It was a writing thing, nothing I was going to publish or show anyone really, just something I did on weekend mornings before the rest of the house woke up. Coffee going cold on the desk. The document open. I liked it in a way I find hard to explain, like it was the one part of the week that felt genuinely mine. I did share a small piece of it once, a few paragraphs, with someone I thought would be kind about it. Or at least neutral. They were not.

Manchester, UKWhen it happened: 40-49#hobbies #confidence

The takeaway

I think I already knew the work was not perfect. What I did not expect was how little defence I had against someone confirming that out loud. I was fine, I kept saying I was fine, and then I just slowly stopped going into that room. Not dramatically. Just quietly.