Tabletop gaming got me a spouse and a bunch of lifelong friends. When I started college back in the '80s, I was an introvert who had a hard time meeting people. I joined a gaming club for something to do, and soon fell in with a group who played an amazingly intense, year-long homegrown campaign. This group spent at least a few nights every week playing the game, and did a lot of things outside it as well. My future spouse joined shortly after I did. Several of the folks from the game went into IT and moved to the Bay Area, so we still game together (not nearly as often, of course). It’s been 37 years and I still consider them good friends.
Online gaming (specifically World of Warcraft) got us two really good friends. They don’t play anymore (moved on to other things) but we still attend conventions with them every year and have discovered a mutual love of escape rooms, so that’s fun.
My biggest hobby, writing, has gotten me a career. Two, actually. Fresh out of college, my writing samples got me an entry-level tech writer position at Xerox, and that career lasted until 2017. In 2015, I started self-publishing my urban fantasy series, and by 2017 I’d quit my job to focus on my writing full-time. Best decision I ever made. I make more at my writing than I did at my tech-writing job.
I have always had hobbies and I can see the dramatic effect they have had on my personality and how I have navigated through life. My primary passion and hobby now is exploring just what you are talking about. I can’t count the number of lives I have seen turned around for the better because of successful social interactions through hobbies. This is something worthy of much more study. One thing I have found is that the groups we associate with become very important to us and we will readily compromise and adjust our behaviors to remain a part of the group.
It took me a decade to admit that it was a “real” hobby. I was always trying to force myself into traditional hobbies. The internet has helped, as I like researching my projects.
I train on obstacles and run obstacle courses. The tangible improvements?
I really got into it right when my husband left me, and the feeling of still making progress in my life when everything was in upheaval was so rewarding. I have videos of myself jumping around exuberantly during that time, because even when I would cry myself to sleep at night, it was a place where I could feel genuine joy.
The physical fitness aspect. I’m a woman in my mid-thirties, and the number of pull-ups I can do is in the double digits. I can jump over an 8 ft wall (12 ft if it’s a warped wall), and I did a back handspring for the first time in my life at the end of last year.
The friends I’ve made. These are not casual friendships. One of them texted me at 4 AM needing someone to talk to when she thought her marriage was ending; another got in touch with me when she had to go to the ER with an injury, letting me know she had listed me as her emergency contact; one came over at 10 PM when I was sobbing and drank wine and ate junk food with me until I fell asleep.
I met my boyfriend doing this.
I made some money. I’ve definitely spent more money than I’ve made, but I made some money coaching at a ninja gym for a while, and I also got a check one time from placing first in a ninja competition.
It’s shown me a lot about the different ways people learn, and how different things work for different people. I’m short, and so a lot of times I’ve had to figure out my own techniques for doing obstacles since your average person in this sport is at least five inches taller and male.
It did wonders for my body image. After spending most of my life thinking women ought to be small and skinny, I decided that being able to do cool things was more important to me than looking breakable.
It also changed my priorities in terms of interacting with men. I used to want men to find me sexy. But as I got good at obstacles, and men would ask me for advice and suggest challenges to me and really treat me as an equal, I realized that feeling respected feels better than feeling sexy.
Honestly, SDMB is a hobby, and it’s done two things for me: exposed me to a much wider range of opinions and perspectives than I ever would have found on my own, and refined my writing to where I have much more control.
The SDMB has made me wiser and a much more effective communicator. I cannot possibly quantify the impact on my life, but it’s been tremendous.
Two hobbies that are really important to me:
First, is my machine shop. I was a machinist in my formative years and never lost the joy of working with metal, so when I hit the mid-century mark I decided to start a machine shop in my basement.
Not only do I have a collection of cool steam engines I have built over the years, but it’s a skill that is always demanding growth and forcing me to learn new techniques.
For example, I finally purchased a rotary table last week and was using it on Sunday to machine a little brass arc that is part of a steam reversing gear set (similar to the one on the moving image half way down this page), and before long I had two sheets of paper filled with trig calculations and sketched arcs and triangles as I was figuring out how to deal with the width of the tool while converting the drawing to the X-Y movements of the mill table and deg/min/sec of the rotary table.
It made my brain hurt, but it’s learning in action.
The second hobby that fits is portrait photography. Every year I go to my kids’ quite small school and do the graduation portraits for the handful of eighth graders. It really makes me happy to be able to give those kids nice portraits. They usually bring the kindergarteners around too, so we get several 8th grade portraits and several kindergarten portraits with tiny caps and gowns, and many happy parents.
The only time I missed was in the Year of the Plague.