I Need a Hobby

Today I want to discuss something that has been a great annoyance for me for the past year at least. As I am getting older I am beginning to grow out of my childhood hobbies, yet I am not replacing them with anything new. I guess I should start by going over what my childhood hobbies were. I was the typical nerdy boy who was obsessed with video games with a collection of Xbox games that numbered over 100 at one point. This is the original Xbox of course. I got it when I was very young because my father is a computer engineer which has resulted in an upbringing centered around technology. Pretty much every dollar I got as a child went straight into the video games. And for those of you who think that video games make people violent I would love to inform you that I was practically raised with a controller in my hand and I am not violent at all. On that note I would like to derail the original point for a second to discuss this topic of violence and video games. People need to realize what exactly the video games do because it is true that they do in fact do something, but not in the way we like to assume. Video games make violent people more violent, but not non-violent people violent. This may seem contradictory but not if you look closely. If you do not "get off" on violence and murderous crimes then a violent video game will just be a fun time waster such as Tetris or Pacman. The only time that video games will effect the violence levels of a person is when that person already has a natural attraction to violence. If this is the case then the video game will serve as a test to show how much the said person enjoys the violent act. Some will say that they will release this desire through video games, but that is not completely true. For most people violence is not an energy bar that will eventually be depleted, but instead is an addiction that will grow. If a person fixates on the violence in a video game, then in some cases that could roll into reality when the person realizes the pleasure they achieve from violence. With this the video game did not create the violence in the person, but instead just showed the desire for violence that was already in the person to them. If you are a non-violent person than most likely you will remain that way unless a severe tragedy or event happens to you. An unimportant game will not change a personality trait. With all that said I will move on to some other hobbies I had which also resemble that of  typical boy. I watched plenty of television, played sports through my school programs (wrestling, baseball, and football), and many other smaller fads throughout my childhood. I don't like to include the fads as hobbies, because I consider a hobby to be something that lasts for a considerable amount of time. Something like Legos or Bionicles is just a fun thing that was popular at the time, but not an actual hobby that I naturally enjoyed. Once those items weren't really popular I eventually moved on to something else which made it a fad not a hobby. I know that I had other hobbies, but I won't try to thing of every one and bore the reader too much. My point is that as I have gotten older I have lost most of my interest in video games and television due to the obvious lack of productivity and usefulness  of the tasks. Don't get me wrong I have no problem with video games or TV but I personally like to make a hobby more productive now. Some people gain a lot from video games and they are an amazing stress reliever, which is great. I have gotten to the point that I cannot sit and play a video game or watch TV for more than an hour or two without feeling this overwhelming sense that I could be doing some much more productive. So I no longer watch TV and I play video games only on the rare occasion when I am feeling extremely lazy or I have friends over that want to play. All of the childhood fads have of course faded away like fads eventually do, and this has left me without a key hobby. I am now writing this blog in an attempt to create a good hobby for myself, but I can already tell that I will need at least a couple more hobbies to fill a week with. I love being active, but now that I am older (using this term very loosely) I have noticed how expensive it is to be an outdoorsy person. I don't drive a rugged, adventurer car or own a lot of equipment for doing things outdoors. I love to kayak, hike, mountain bike, and rock climb, but most of the time I lack the funds or friends to do these activities. I have also come to the obvious idea of spending time reading, but I also get the same feeling about reading fiction books as I do with watching television and playing video games. Reading is an amazing thing to do, but I always feel that reading about an imaginary story is no different than watching a show about an imaginary family or playing a game based on an imaginary world. All of these seem to be fun, but not very productive or meaningful. When I read I prefer for the books to be non-fiction and often times educational as well. This also results in the inability to read for really long periods of time due to eventual burnout on the subject. So now I feel stuck in a place where I want a hobby to fill my time with, but can't seem to find one affordable and productive. I have looked into volunteer work and things like that, but so far they all seem so difficult to actual get started. This may just be my laziness kicking in, but I can't seem to actual get a solid, continual volunteer activity going. I have an amazing girlfriend that use to take up a ton of my time, which I loved, but now with things like school and work getting harder and more time consuming we do not get as much time as we use to. I am not saying that this is horrible, but just pointing it out to show that the relationship doesn't take up a huge portion of my time anymore. If anyone has any ideas for great hobbies I would love to hear them. Right now I bounce back and forth between watching way too many movies, which I am aware seem like they should have the same effect as TV or fiction books but they don't, and wasting my time with stupid game apps on my phone which drive me crazy more than full console video games. I realize that it is not very logical to turn away video games as a hobby, but to replace them with a smaller version of a video game on my phone. The stupid games are just so addicting that I found myself continuously turning to them in times of boredom. This is an addiction I definitely need to get rid of. I believe that this brings an end to this post. Thank you for reading.
Sincerely - CO