And perhaps? For me, the reward comes from the learning. (Who would have thought, being a software engineer by trade).
Luckily my brain has a self-invalidating cache, but my home, not so much. Perhaps I will find the right hobby, but it should not be something that involves the accumulation of things, because the things weigh a hidden cost of possession. It’s this hidden cost that hurts, like a tax, an inefficiency of the mind, or being. It’s insidious because it’s almost impossible to attribute the friction with the possession, because you’re often not actively dealing with it, but it’s there. It’s like, you know you have 32gb of RAM, but for some reason you’re only working with 20gb but you can’t inspect what’s stealing the other 12gb. It’s only after removing things from disk, do you start to see the RAM getting freed up, and then you begin to appreciate the extra mental resources.
Not sure if you have a background outside of software engineering, but as someone who got a degree in mechanical engineering and then shifted over to software engineering I've landed on home/car maintenance as a pretty good base hobby to fall back on. There's always more to learn, you can do most of it with a pretty limited set of tools, and it has the added bonus of improving daily life.
This may be a bit specific to me since I bought an older house and car in the past year and they require a bit more TLC. My partner and I painted all of the rooms (tools are just paint, brushes, and rollers). I've replaced almost all of the outlets and switches, including putting in a few zigbee switches (Sonoff ZBMINIR2s to be specific) since we have no overhead lights in any of our rooms and the switches don't control the right outlets... The only tools for that work are a screwdriver and a wire stripper. We also hung some cabinets in our living room and put up some bookshelves (made easier with power tools, but possible with hand tools). When it got warm, we did a bunch of work outside including some brick edging (bucket, mason line, and a trowel) and a fire pit (shovel, level, rake, and tamper).
Cars require some more tools but you can do pretty much every bit of maintenance work with a standard set of wrenches, a jack, and jack stands.
Everything just sits against the wall or in a toolbox in the garage. It's a big 2 car garage but it fits a home gym set-up, a TV on a cart, a workbench, a bunch of furniture that we need to get rid of on FB Marketplace, and there's still room to pull in a car (mine is in there right now since I'm changing the spark plugs).
And perhaps? For me, the reward comes from the learning. (Who would have thought, being a software engineer by trade).
Luckily my brain has a self-invalidating cache, but my home, not so much. Perhaps I will find the right hobby, but it should not be something that involves the accumulation of things, because the things weigh a hidden cost of possession. It’s this hidden cost that hurts, like a tax, an inefficiency of the mind, or being. It’s insidious because it’s almost impossible to attribute the friction with the possession, because you’re often not actively dealing with it, but it’s there. It’s like, you know you have 32gb of RAM, but for some reason you’re only working with 20gb but you can’t inspect what’s stealing the other 12gb. It’s only after removing things from disk, do you start to see the RAM getting freed up, and then you begin to appreciate the extra mental resources.