If you keep it retro gaming than it can be used as a clever money saving technique if you stick to the timesink of the oldschool grind. Throw on a podcast or an album to listen to for getting through the thicker parts of the grind, or even a documentary to casually listen to. Or if you have a dual monitor setup, than splitting it would suffice.
I've not really been into anime in roughly 20 years or so, but I'd go through Cowboy Bebop and/or Trigun and Outlaw Star again. They're all timeless.
I use hobbies as a timesink and money saving trick to counterbalance my objective bullet list.
When I burn myself out on one or the other I just rebalance and that helps.
That's just how I've learned to cope with loneliness over the years.
I try to keep my mind actively engaged and busy with something, somehow.
I do socialize, just quite minimally. I only see 2 or 3 people in person and even that's somewhat of a handful for me these days.
But the main and key important part is keeping my mind actively engaged and busy.
If I burn myself out with my hobbies, I step away from them and get back to my responsibilities, trying to think about how I might be able to more efficiently manage them, or ask myself if there are any additional I'd like to take on (which in its own is an actively engaging thought, as it's particularly unwise to just take on a new responsibility with only a whimsical half-thought, I've learned my lesson on that one by now).
There's only so many hours in a day, right?
Work is going to eat a good chunk of that.
Housework is another chunk.
Bills and groceries and financial planning, yet another chunk.
So that helps minimize the larger majority a bit.
What about the rest though?
Hobbies and Responsibilities.
If not one, than the other.
Gotta keep the mind going, don't care how, so long as it isn't self-destructive.
Because if Self-Destruction wins out, well, then I have to admit that I've reached my limitations and self-sabotage just befell me as such.
It is okay for that to happen provided I do not stagnate in such the state.
Gotta get up off the floor, clean myself off, and start fixing what I screwed up...
And THAT in its own, is a timesink.
"Repetition is the Mother Of All Learning" so sayeth my former music professor.
I met an old man in his middle to late 50's when I was in my 20's who gave me a bit of insight about mental health and aging.
What he told me is that after 20 years of being with his same therapist, his therapist finally said to him one day: "Have you ever considered that maybe life just isn't that grand, like for anybody? That there's no shining, "finding the holy grail" type of a moment in life? Realistically, that is just a fantasy. Fantasy is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it can be dangerous to our reality if we do not keep it in check."
Plot Twist being, that the old man who told me this, was also the old man who stole my gf at the time.
It took me several years to extrapolate what he meant and why he said it to me.
And it didn't really make sense, until some years later she told me that he's absolutely miserable most of the time and that he pretty much straight up just gamed our relationship situation to get with her. So she is also, miserable most of the time.
But why did he tell me this?
It's because he was trying to tell me not to end up like him.
For once he wasn't lying.
Often times our approach to mental roadblocks can be counterintuitive to us as humans.
The reason getting started on something is hard is because it's actually the getting started part that is the roadblock in the first place, and what we actually want comes thereafter. All of life is like this. I don't like it, but it is. And yes, it is incredibly challenging and yes it is exhausting.
It is that way because a very large part of the problem is that as humans we as people are subjective beings, we have feelings, dreams, thoughts and desires...but the socially constructed society and civilization that we live in isn't organic like that. That's because it's unnatural. Our sedentary lifestyle isn't natural. It isn't organic. It's mechanical. We MADE it that way. Buildings are built because we built them, not because nature made it so organically. And so there is always this internal conflict between the objective and the subjective., and this is a very large part of the problem that we have because it is not always easy to be able to discern which one is more needed and too much of either one or the other is bad for our physical and mental health alike. It's a Hell of a balancing act and all of us as humans struggle with it.
