You might be depressed. Dysthymia is sort of a long term depression.

I feel like I’ve spent half my life just addicted to social media and video games and that’s no longer working.

I definitely relate to this. some time back I kind of forced myself to focus on something long enough to turn it into a hobby. I didn’t stick with that, but I eventually got into playing music again, and I’ve stuck with it for a while now and I’ve built a couple guitars and a bunch of pedals as well.

I think, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have to force yourself into a hobby for a while until it sticks.

I’ve found hobbies and interests require a certain amount of stability. Mine tend to disappear if I’m stressed about an eviction or whatever. Life just needs to let up

But not anything I have ever put time into, or am good at, or am knowledgeable enough to hold a conversation.

I agree that it sounds a lot like you’re describing dysthymia but a hobby doesn’t need to be something that you are good at or an expert in; you can be a terrible artist or a cook who barely knows how to make a single dish and that’s completely fine because a hobby is something you do because you are passionate about it and you find it personally interesting or rewarding on some level. Some hobbyists are extremely knowledgeable and skillful in their interest but many - I’d argue most - are not, and that’s completely fine.

If you bounce between hobbies, that’s completely fine. Maybe you haven’t found a consuming passion yet or maybe bouncing between hobbies is what suits you best. Or maybe life is particularly demanding or your mental health isn’t great and so you can’t dedicate much time towards hobbies right now, if you can dedicate any time towards them, and that’s pretty common too.

unfortunately the only solution to this that I’ve found (besides properly medicating yourself in cases of physiological barriers, of course) is being willing to be very bad at something for a while until suddenly you realize “wait I’m way more put-together on this than the average person???” and then it becomes a bit more fun because it makes you feel like you have a strength.

The other unfortunate thing is that you are going to have to clock whether or not a hobby will be fulfilling for you, like, six months or more of regularized investment before you actually start seeing signs of it. You aren’t exactly going to know, and sometimes it just won’t work out despite your time and effort. just how it is.

In my case, it really helped me to view the tedium as goal-oriented; I want to make a game, so I’m going to learn what I need to make a game.

Almost four years ago I was absolutely dreading the idea of being responsible for the music because I felt like I was genuinely dogshit at composition in a way that was irreparable. Late 2021 I pushed myself into trying it despite that. This semester I was personally recommended by a previous professor of mine to be in a more exclusive composition workshop with a visiting prof. In January 2022 I was making shit like this. Less than six months later I made this. Another six months, made this. this week, here’s a rough snippet I whipped up wholesale in 30 minutes over lunch with a sandwich in my free hand. This isn’t religious devotion to the hobby, this is like spending a couple hours a week tinkering for like a year and then afterwards being just sporadic enough to not get totally rusty.

As I’ve seen it put, the time will pass anyway, and I used it to turn something that was fundamentally embarrassing for me in a way that I was bargaining to get it off my plate into something that makes me feel happy about myself. The primary question of a hobby is always “does this make you happy,” you’re not going to find out until you’re knee-deep in it. The investment is daunting–my executive functioning is shot, so I totally get it. Sometimes you’re hooked, sometimes you gotta get in the mud with it until you understand it.

sorry if this is sorta grandstandy, I just kinda had almost the same thought process about this all a bit ago and it took a while of wading through the muck for me to finally have it click for me. hope it all works out for you,

Sounds like depression to me. I abandoned all my hobbies for about a decade due to extended depression

So, you sound pretty depressed, but also like nobody’s shown much of an interest in you thriving or you weren’t able to return it or… Something. and thats super fucked.

Here’s what I recommend: do the shit you need to do, but see if you can do it better. Dont do it the easy way, do it the awesome way.

You could microwave that potato and put butter on it, or you could do something fancy with green onions and a fancy sauce. Start simple, embellish a little. Set goals. Even gamify it. Just get really good at the shit you needed to do anyway.

Maybe you’ll find the advanced level of driving or cooking or whatever is fun or calming or engaging. Maybe you’ll just get better at basic life shit.

And if that doesn’t find you anything to really get into; start asking yourself ‘how hard could that be?’ then find the answer as you make cat strangling noises on a violin or build the worst table ever. Keep going til you can do a sorta decent one, unless you really hate it. You’ll probably pick up a bunch of skills at a level where you can do basic tasks or assist on more advanced projects. Maybe you’ll find one you love. Try showing stuff off to people you like and trust. See if that does anything for you.

And I’m down to talk with you about the thing youre trying.

honey you are definitely depressed

also video games is a fine hobby

Hobbies might have some kind of internal “source” but they also need to be nurtured. You can’t love what you don’t know, you know? I have a bunch of weird interests now and each of them began with not much more than a sort of mental double-take that served as a starting point. Like the question “what is squid ink made out of anyway?” can be the start of an interest in marine biology.

Depression makes it very hard to catch these little moments since it smothers that little mote of curiosity and pleasure that can be the start of a passion.

We have a lot in common. In my case it’s a whole bunch of things including some attention problem, depression, and just generally being poorly socialized.

If you arbitrarily spend time on something for a while, it’ll become more interesting to you.

I mean there’s limits to that, but it’ll largely work for most of the things that are common hobbies.

What constitutes a hobby?

I was encouraged from a young age to read books. I still do. I enjoy it. Are books a hobby?

My parents are both music fans. Had a big music collection, went to a lot of concerts. I’m the same. I enjoy it.

It’s a short leap from books (eg: lotr) and some music (eg: some metal, some prog rock) to DND and similar games. It looked cool so I got into it.

Bikes are pretty ecologically friendly and the exercise is good. I’ve only dipped my toes into biking but it wouldn’t be a big leap to buy my own bike, find s meetup, or whatever.

A friend of mine learned about weaving… somewhere. I don’t know where actually. But they said "that looks cool’ and looked into it. Now they weave and knit and such. Read about it online, watched some videos, signed up for a class.

A guy I know saw some photos online and went “that’s cool. I could do that” and I think took a beginner class in it. Bought an entry level camera and just has fun taking pictures of stuff.

The common thread here is it’s all stuff people enjoy.

Maybe delete more of your social media. That stuff is bad for you. A friend of mine started tracking how much time they spent on it, and realized it was like 4 hours a day doing nothing on Instagram. It’s mostly trash. You don’t need it.

Some guys at work are getting into chess. Not sure where it started but now they’re playing and reading about strategy and stuff.

Don’t beat yourself up over being bad at things.

In the development of my own interests and hobbies there was a good mix of…

• deliberately choosing to do things because I thought it would make it easier for me to make friends
• copying things I read in books, or saw in movies or on TV
• inertia from previous interests
• just the straight-up material conditions of my life

Most of my interests over the course of my life can be looked at from several of these angles.

For instance, one of the several factors that eventually culminated in me becoming a conlanger was that I read Captain Underpants when I was about 6 or 7 years old: because I read that book, I decided to try drawing my own little gag comic, in which a kid flushes the toilet in a public restroom, and then the poop comes out of the toilet in the next stall over, and then the kid in that stall flushes the toilet and the poop goes back to the first stall, and then the kids say in unison something like, “Talk about faulty plumbing!” — I drew that comic, and I resolved that I would make copies of it to distribute at the playground, just like George and Harold did, and then all my peers would come to me and beg me to draw more high-layrious comics, and I would make a name for myself and make a bajillion friends lickety split. 'Twas a foolproof plan!

…Well, I didn’t end up making copies of that comic or even showing the original off to anyone, but I refused to let some initial hiccups like that dishearten me from seeing through my foolproof plan to take over the wor— I mean, make friends with my classmates!

And so I drew another comic strip.

And then another.

And then another.

I guess I was hoping I’d eventually make something good enough to distribute, which I never necessarily achieved, but I did go from drawing bad attempts at yonkoma, to drawing something closer to storyboards for bad short films with a recurring cast of characters, namely schoolkids loosely based on myself and some of my classmates. My comics were impressive by the standards with which we’d judge the artwork of little kids.

But yeah, in any case, a few years later I got caught up in the hype around space colonization and stuff, and so I decided to draw a comic where my characters got on a giant rocket ship to reside on an artificial “school planet” — yes, the same kids who were exchanging poop like a hot potato at the start of this comic series, were now astronauts on another planet. So I had in drawing that particular comic about the rocket, shifted the setting of my comic series away from basically just a copy of my own primary school, to a brand new world which I was free to develop in any way I wished. And develop it I did: I thought about how the schoolkids lived and got around, what sorts of zany misadventures and hidden secrets this planet held, what sorts of technology they had access to — and eventually I started drawing maps and flags and I coined names for the different regions of the school planet, because I’d imagined that the school planet setting could be used for a kid-friendly open-world video game (I was totally not jealous of the older kids for getting to play GTA!)

So yeah. That was my first real foray into worldbuilding, and later worldbuilding projects would lead me to start conlanging. There were of course several other factors that led to the interest in worldbuilding sustaining itself and developing further, and other factors that led me to move on from relexes and ciphers to developing actual constructed languages, but just this anecdote is plenty long by itself.

I get that, I feel like I’ve never really been interested in anything. There’s nothing about life I really like, no one I care for except for my mother and that’s mostly just out of feelings of guilt.

When I see other people not being miserable I just feel like they must be faking things, I genuinely don’t understand what the point of any of this is, or how life is fulfilling to them. I used to play a lot of video games in my spare time but for years now that has just been completely uninteresting too.

On the plus side, I’ve been able to get myself to consistently work out and stick to eating the same healthy and cheap things every single day for multiple years now, because I have no interest in trying anything else anymore and hated myself enough to stick with the training when it was tough at the start lol So maybe that’s worth giving a shot?

“Computers” is a big hobby of mine (recently turned into a job as well). Specifically Linux became interesting to me as I became concerned about privacy. Hmm, maybe you could say privacy/security is a hobby of mine… At any rate, the point is that I had some problems I wanted to solve, and the hobby/hobbies sort of grew around that.

Worried about surveillance? Start learning about Linux and internet security. Worried about political violence? Learn about self defense and firearms. Worried about food security? Learn about gardening/scavenging/mutual aid. Etc etc.

For a lot of people, hobbies are just collecting consumer goods. Don’t do that. Learn a skill that helps you, and that you can teach to others at some point.

I’ve felt he same way as you. If you have an activist tenant or worker organization or a socialist party that’s actually work joining know that they want and need your time even if you think you have nothing to offer them. If you show up consistently when they need you it won’t matter if you have nothing interesting to say.

Go to a DIY space (micro cinema, punk concert venue, comedy club) and you’ll find other poorly socialized people which really doesn’t make it any easier on you; two awkward people not knowing how to carry on a conversation is worse than one. But the point here is to realize you survive these scenarios (and aren’t alone) and build comfort and confidence in being uncomfortable.

Cooking, wood working, gardening. These are hobbies so neglected by most people these days that at an advanced beginner level you’re already beyond the average person. Try various hobbies, give each one 2 or 3 genuine attempts, stick with the one that made you feel the most alive. I didn’t like cooking at first but grew to really appreciate the process and how much direct control you have over an act of transformation.

Just some thoughts.