Looking for a new hobby? Then look no further! Here are some awesome ones that are mostly super cheap too.
If you have any interesting hobbies of your own, leave a comment and let us know!
It’s basically making things using natural materials in nature. If you google bushcraft, you can learn how to make spoons, baskets, knives, paint, etc. from nature.
This guy takes it to the extreme:
ninjablueberry268
The cost of a pack of cards: 0.50 – 4.00
The things you can do with a pack of cards:
1. Card magic
2. Cardistry.
3. Card throwing.
4. Memory sport. Two of the skills required in order to become a Grandmaster of Memory is to memorize a single deck of cards under two minutes and ten decks of cards in an hour. Interested? Check out Art of Memory. They have a pretty active forum community and a really useful wiki.
5. Card body weight workouts. Assign an exercise to each suit and pick a card randomly. Perform the same number of reps as the number on the card, introducing multipliers for non-numbered cards. (Note: this is a good method for any technique based activity, really.)
6. Grip sport. This is a bit of a cop-out, I admit, but a famous feat of strength is to tear a full deck of cards in half with your bare hands. Being able to do so requires heavily developed grip strength.
Yeah, just buy a pack of cards. Four of the activities mentioned (card magic, cardistry, a few card games and memory sport) will take a lifetime to master and ought to provide you with hours of entertainment and personal development.
St0neM0nkey
If you like history and you’re ok with drawing and colouring you need just Photoshop/Gimp to start colorizing old black and white photographs.
-spend time at research what had what colour and learn about history
-discover unique photographs
-make some abstract 100 year old scene look like it is now
-gain satisfaction from your progress and people appreciating your work
purpleefilthh
Digital 3D modeling. There are good free programs like Blender (which also does animation).
SkittyLover93
Small engines.
Pick up lawn mowers/snow blowers/tillers/powerwashers/generators off the curb.
Take them home, clean the carburetor, change the spark plug, blow out the air cleaner and 95% chance they will run perfectly.
Sell them and feel accomplished.
Buy more tools, repeat.
Start on old barn find motorcycles after that.
VictimMode
Mushroom hunting. There are so many kinds to discover. In my two years, I’ve found a few bundles of edibles but no wild magic mushrooms. Plenty of poisonous/inedible ones, but the collection and process of IDing is fun and rewarding.
welcomewilson
Urban exploration! See an abandoned hospital/school/mansion? Waltz on in, take a picture, crack a joke about axe-murderers, leave.
ZeroTheKitten
MARTIAL ARTS Tricking. A lot of people learn tricking barefoot in their back gardens. Here’s a cool list of tricks you can learn (note that the more advanced stuff is best done in a specialized facility, but you don’t have to worry about that for now.)
It’s scary stuff alright. However, I’m not going to ask you to just jump into a back flip right there and then! There are many basic things you can practice (like rolls, cartwheels and handstands) that will prepare you further.
Please note: Tricking is not recommended for people who are overweight or unfit. The stress that landings place on your knees is no joke. You want to get down basic fitness before you try this. “Well, I guess that’s that. No more tricking for me, huh?” Three years ago I was going through a tough time and became overweight, unfit and depressed. Last week I did thirty back-flips to prove a point to my friend. You can do it. It is possible. Don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise and don’t let you tell yourself otherwise.
/r/fitness, /r/bodyweightfitness, /r/loseit… they have your back. Now, onto the resources!
1) I personally believe that Jujimufu is secretly the son of some Norse deity. His website has a great deal of information that you can read.
2) Okay, okay, I get it. The list I provided at first lists really hard skills as novice skills. However, remember, the tricks shown there are foundational skills. These are the skills you have to know, skills that you work on before you get into the cool stuff. I feel as though on average, it’ll take somebody between one to two years to get that stuff down. Tricking has an insane learning curve, but when you get over that? You’re laughing.
3) Here’s a very, very rough mindmap to skills I made a while back. It’s not a full guide! Check it out, it’s got a much friendlier novice section.
alex30fill
Sitting. You can find places to sit almost anywhere. There are chairs and benches. There are ledges and logs. I mean, you can get really crazy with it and sit in some crazy places.
I recently went out of town and sat in a tube on some water with a cold beer. I enjoy sitting quite a bit.
Every once in a while you’ll run into one of those bad-boy-renegade sitters who walks the line between sitting and standing. That’s called squatting. The semantics of it are a bit to ‘out there’ for a simple sitter like myself. But dammit, those guys don’t have to stand in places I can’t sit. Mind blowing.
Go take a seat friendo!
[deleted]
World building can be really fun if you’re into doing creative stuff. Mostly free to do as well. r/worldbuilding is an amazing help at designing my universe!
FPSGamer48
Make an Ant colony… I did this, loved it, then a disease came in and wiped them out. Poor buggers.
Step 1: Find an ant colony, better to get a bigger ant like some kind of carpenter.
Step 2: Get a big ass container, fill it with dirt. Okay so maybe the container might cost money like 10$.
Step 3: GET THE QUEEN! This is a bit tricky so you might have to get a friend who is good at catching ant queens. You can do two things, try to flood her out or smoke her out. To flood her out simply keep a steady stream of water into the main hole, to smoke sort of do the same thing but with smoke. You’ll see her come out of a side exit hole and you’ll notice her. Big, tons of guards with other slave ants carrying her. GRAB HER!
Step 4: Put her in the dirt bin, also catch a couple dozen worker ants and throw them in with her. I caught about another 60 ants of all classes to help start the new colony.
Step 5: Buy crickets, probably like 5$, or worms or some kind of other feeder bug and throw them in daily. You can also go around catching bugs, I did this.
Step 6: Watch the colony ant grow. Eventually when they settle in and the bin because their main ant hill you can place the bin outside somewhere. For mine I put little stick ramps for ant lines to get off the bin and into my yard. That way when the ant colony gets bigger you won’t have to feed them as much as they’ll do that themselves.
I had mine for almost a year and it was awesome! I was in 8th grade when I did this. I put them on a far end of my yard and after the colony got strong enough I let them roam outside the bin. They were like my creations. They went to war with other ant colonies in the yard, killed off hundreds of spiders, and soon had an empire stretching from one end to the other. Sadly something happened where they all got sick and died.. I cried.
I_Like_To_Learn
Penspinning, sure way to annoy your co-workers while you attempt to learn it! 😀 But once you got some of that tricks it’s a nice way to kill time in the office while waiting for something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzAdoKnwhdY
Gvnd
You can make a video game using free online software:
- http://unity3d.com/get-unity
- https://www.unrealengine.com/
- /u/HeavyHDx says: http://www.godotengine.org/
- /u/zxj4k3xz says: http://www.yoyogames.com/get
- https://play0ad.com/ – free, open-source, historical RTS game, being built, and could use more help
FrancisMcKracken
Geocaching!
Basically, it’s a game where people hide caches (boxes with a logbook and items to trade if big enough) around the world and post the coordinates on the Internet and other people go find them. Sort of like a 21st century scavenger hunt. If you have a smartphone, you can download an app to give it a try that’s free for the first few finds (and something like $10 after that if you like it).
Odds are if you log onto geocaching.com and search your area, you’ll be surprised to see how close the nearest geocache is to you right now!
Andromeda321
Wood burning, or pyrography. Basically drawing, but on wood with a soldering-iron-like-thing. It’s really cool!
AlgebraExe
Buy an older pair of binoculars.
Get a decent 7×35, something Japanese made from the 60’s. (Wide angle are very fun, try one if you can)
Everything outside gets instantly awesomer. Birds, squirrels, bugs, trees, geography, clouds, sunsets, more birds, even people.
And then…. It gets dark. The night sky turns into the trippiest shit you have ever seen. Right now Orion is up high nice and early in the evening. Take your binos to the back yard at night and look at the Orion Nebula. You will flip your lid.
You can also see the Andromeda galaxy hurtle toward us, early evenings. One day it will collide with the Milky Way. And yet, not a single star would likely touch another. That is the scale of what you are watching at 7x magnification for under $50. With your own eyes.
Binoculars. Not for the faint of heart.
BookEight
Ham Radio is pretty fun.
Sounds expensive, but I started out with a $25 radio that could pick up local stations and transmit to repeaters. If all else fails, you have a fancy walkie talkie that scans frequencies and has terrific battery life.
From there I got a $15 antenna and a $5 cord and drastically improved my radio’s coverage and usability. I recently bought an RTL-SDR for $25, which is like the radio I had but for your computer – you can begin viewing what radio signals actually look like. And the antenna sucked so I bought an adapter cable ($5) and a new antenna($15). I could use the antenna off my other radio to read signals also now. As far as antennas go, they can be expensive (for home use, you could see them up to $500-1000+) or essentially free (build them from household items like coat hangers and cardboard).
What’s the value in it? Well it’s person to person and area to area. If you’re into computers you can read data from random signals in the air, which is neat. Retrieve photos from weather balloons, track airplanes in the sky, hear about emergencies in your area, get the weather from NOAA, find numbers stations, the list goes on. It’s one of those things where the more you play, the more you want to try out. Most of it is just exploratory – that is you won’t typically get a whole lot of benefit from it. But if you’re curious, ham radio is a bottomless pit of interesting stuff.
SUCK_MY_DICTIONARY
Modular Origami
https://www.flickr.com/photos/origami_tatsujin/
it combines art & geometry hours of endless fun/frustration.
Addie_Goodvibes
Modern yoyoing.
I got into it in April of last year and it has been some of the most fun I’ve had in my life.
For $50 you can buy an EXCELLENT competition level yoyo and all the accessories you need.
BTW, this is what modern yoyos are like
then join us at /r/Throwers
moby323
My friend had hobby of writing condolences letters to the soldiers who died in the war… He keeps writing motivational letters to their families, even though he is suffering from clinical depression himself.
Stifmeister11
Making medieval chainmail. It’s like knitting, but more metal. There are lots of different kinds of weaves, and you can make so many things with chainmail – jewelry, hauberks, gloves, anything!
All you need is:
- Wire (I use 18 gauge steel because it’s strong)
- Pliers x2
- Wire cutters
- A metal or wooden rod (to wrap the wire around to make the loops)
I like doing it while watching tv or movies on Netflix, because it gives my hands something to fidget with.
ninjablueberry268
Mongolian Throat Singing.
My boyfriend practices this all the time.
All.
the.
time.
I think it’s really cool and all that junk but we’ll go to the grocery store and he’ll throat sing through the whole thing.
lizlemonkush
I collect old family photos I find in antique stores. They’re usually a dime a piece and I try to buy the ones that have some sort of writing or helpful identifying piece. I started doing this about 10 years ago and just kept them in an album (it’s very important to put them in the kind where the photos go in sleeves, nothing with glue or tape) but I recently got into geneology and started uploading the pictures to online databases. I’m hoping their descendants will see them and find something out about their history.
Some people find it odd, but I just think it’s so sad to think of all those photos, which were very expensive long ago, to sit in a box with a price tag on them. They meant a lot to those in the photos, I’m sure.
SpaghettiTuesdays23
It’s called “letter boxing.” You have a stamp, ink pad and a journal. There are hidden boxes all over the world. You go here http://www.atlasquest.com and type in your location and they will tell you where boxes are hidden around your area. In the boxes are a stamp, ink pad and journal. You stamp their stamp in your book and then stamp your stamp in their book. It’s like a scavenger hunt. Very fun.
jellybeanqueen2121
Crewing on someone else’s sailboat. Just go to a marina and ask around. Racers are always looking for crew.
There’s all sorts of websites / forums where people are looking for crew, but hanging around docks is the best way. Not so easy when you have literally zero experience, but learning hands-on, you’ll learn pretty fast.
I know people who have travelled the world, just volunteering on sailboats.
cabarne4
If you have a beach near you looking for sea glass is a really relaxing pastime, my parents go on at least two walks a week and you can come up with some pretty cool stuff.
gd2234
Shouting.
Go for a walk in the countryside or lock yourself in the bathroom, it doesn’t matter where you are as long as you’re on your own, then just start bellowing your lungs out. At first you won’t be able to shout at the top of your voice for very long without becoming hoarse but given time your vocal cords will develop the leathery texture of a rhino and you’ll be able to yell to your heart’s content.
This is a very cheap hobby, needing no specialized equipment, clothing or training.
F*ckCazadors
DANCING: I’m a bboy at heart. I learned my first top rocks, downrocks and freezes through the internet. /r/bboy has an excellent help guide, with YouTube channels and examples that help out a lot. /r/FunkStyle is active and will help you out when it comes to popping. There are tons of information out there on the web; google “
alex30fill
Source 1. Source 2. Source 3. Source 4.