adult hobbies

[amw]

This week has been less than optimal. There's the usual work stuff, okay, but outside of that my mind has gone off on one of its spirals, the kind of spiral i haven't been on since the Finding Clothes For An Ogre Debacle of April 2024

Comments

[spiffikins]

I got into painting - I started with going to "paint and sip" events and then during the lockdown, pivoted to virtual events over zoom. This was good for two reasons - they gave me something to sign up for an *do* while stuck at home, and gave me some exposure to *people* even if only over zoom.

I enjoy it, and I have done a LOT of paintings - mostly in events with a teacher, but some by myself, and some following tutorials on youtube.

The downside - like with a lot of creative things - it generates a TON of "product". And I'm not nearly good enough to give it away, much less sell it - so it stacks up, LOL

Making music seems like a much better idea - music files take up a LOT less space than my stacks of paintings :D

I get the brain weasels though - if you buy all the gear to do something - how much do you have to use it to make it worthwhile? Maybe you can figure out a "per use" cost that will make you feel like you got your money's worth - like if you spend $250 on something - then you can consider it 'paid for' if you use it 10 times @$25/time, assuming you use it for an hour at a time? Presumably the cost to rent/borrow the same thing would be $25/hour (if you can even do that?)

Like - I bought a year pass to our state parks - it was $125 and is valid for 13 months - but it costs $10 to get into the park if you just pay the entrance fee - so as long as I go at least 1x a month, I'm breaking even - anything more than that, and I'm saving money by buying the pass. I have to do weird crap like this in my brain to justify stuff, because I am cheap and am bad at spending money on stuff like this.

[amw]

Yeah, I think that part about trying to justify it is where things start to break down for me. Because certain things like computer games you pay relatively little money and get tens of hours of entertainment in return, it's a dollar per hour or even less for large or on-sale games. Books are more expensive, relatively speaking, but even still you're looking at maybe two or three dollars an hour. I spend around $100 a year (per subscription) on various media subscriptions, but if I only read an hour a week for the year, it's comparable. But then when you buy musical equipment that stuff usually starts at a few hundred and the sky is the limit. You really have to put in a couple hours a week for a year...

I guess this is how parents feel when their kid decides they want to learn an instrument. "Yeah, but how much do you REALLY want to learn it?"

I never really thought about all the product you end up when you paint as a hobby, but now that i have i'm glad i never got into it! I suppose you can reuse canvas and recycle paper?