Asklemmy

42480 readers

1709 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Feeling lost and with no direction, what skill should I learn? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi everyone. I am feeling like I've lost any direction after getting laid off earlier this year (was working as an analyst in telecom and very recently landed a much lower position in healthcare data entry due to necessity). I already have several hobbies but I am either burnt out on them or they have lost their luster (similar to how life has lost its luster for me this past 6 months).

I would really love to learn a new skill, preferably using my hands to create something while challenging my brain. I'm willing to take classes, study, practice, and buy some equipment required for the skill.

Please tell me about your skill/hobby that gives you purpose. I've kind of exhausted google search which always returns the same 20 or so craft suggestions like "make custom invitations for weddings", and while that sounds good for someone, it may not be good for me.

Current hobbies: Music composition and gardening,

EDIT: trying to move away from hobbies that involve me sitting in front of a computer. I already do that way too much.

(page 3) 3 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I've (more or less) got those two hobbies as well! :D

I work on cars for fun, but that might not be the most budget friendly thing to do outside of basic car maintenance. Of course, this is assuming that you or a friend has a car to work on.

What if you get an Arduino starter kit? That involves putting things together with your hands and writing code to make the hardware do cool things.

For music production, you could check out a website like Looperman or a subscription service like Splice. Then, download a few audio samples and use them as a starting point for a song. This helped me get back into music production after a five month period of minimal inspiration.

Photography (even with a cellphone) could be nice too. You could even use it as a reason to do physical activities like hiking.

EDIT: Have you been hanging out with friends regularly? If not, I think that it should be

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Programming. Challenging and creative in a way that is different than art & music but still somehow similar. I find it almost relaxing sometimes. Python is a great first language and you can go from no knowledge whatsoever to a working program that does something genuinely useful in an hour, like scraping a website and showing you some data from it. Mastery takes years.

If you genuinely enjoy programming, you can legitimately change the world with your knowledge. There are tons of open source projects out there which benefit humanity yet don't have enough development talent. It's one thing to volunteer your time and see a good outcome from it, it's another to volunteer your time to build a system which guarantees good outcomes for many people over long time periods and get to see that system grow and get used by people.

load more comments