Fueling your passion
Humans are intelligent, social creatures. Most of us follow a routine or schedule and have responsibilities that need to be fulfilled. However, everyone of us have those few (or frequent, depending on who you are) times where we have nothing to do. Nothing on the agenda. And that is when we feel something we all experience: boredom.
We all need stimulation, or our minds get restless. Time feels like a drag. This is where our hobbies come in to the rescue. Some people like to go out and socialize. Some of us enjoy immersing ourselves in a story-setting via film/novels/games. Some like to work on a project of some sort of skill. Ultimately, we just need something to keep our minds busy.
With the 2020 pandemic and forward, this was even more evident. People were stuck in their homes. I myself picked up a new hobby… cooking. I never really bothered to learn how to cook other than the simple fried eggs, fried rice, or boiled vegetables. Other than that, it was always ordering from restaurants or frozen foods. But with so much extra time, I was able to start to practice more complicated cooking!
As of now, I can’t make anything extravagant, but I can make a decent meal without burning anything. Just dishes with protein and vegetables and grain. I will say that cooking is actually more fun than I had originally thought and much more cost-effective. Although I still despise cleaning and washing dishes (no, I do not have a dishwasher).
In fact, my entire beginnings with programming and coding started out as a hobby. During my first college and years after, I always dabbled in coding simply because I wanted to know how websites and the internet worked. While I did not do much more than simple HTML and CSS, I still remember following along beginner tutorials. My first website was just a local HTML file with <p> and <li> elements. It was a hobby, and one that I did not take too seriously until I decided it was time for a career change.
Now, it is pretty much the main thing I do. Whether it is coding for a class, or programming for a personal project, my hobby has become my next main focus. So all in all, hobbies are a wonderful thing that can simply be a way to pass the time, or even become our next big endeavor in our lifetime.