This is going to be a tedious list. I'll limit the list to things I can do without much money, because honestly given any more than a few hundred dollars the possibilities are endless. (They're endless anyway, really.)
Explore the suburbs with friends, look for parks and lakes, play frisbee at said parks, play tennis with friends, get really dizzy on the spinny things at said parks, eat at Applebee's, start conversations with Applebee's staff, organize a group pelvic thrusting session throughout Applebee's parking lot, organize late-night group exploration of Lowe's, walk through back alleys looking for interesting things, make Mario hats out of paper, buy people flowers, go to foreign restaurants and delis, stay up late at night sitting in hammocks, see bands performing, take road trips, attend music festivals and marathons and barbecues, paint, play arcade games, mess around with old consoles/computers, play tabletop games, romp through woodlands, play with pets, work out, explore houses, look for critters in woodlands/houses, wander streets at midnight, go to karaoke bars, rent movies from tiny stores, make music, go to the boardwalk, visit aquariums, watch sunsets, set off fireworks, go to cities and look for interesting people, spend excessive amounts of money on dollar menus at fast food places, walk on beaches, collect and polish rocks, build models, read up on ancient cultures, play pool, learn martial arts, play board games, sit and hold hands with people...
That's approx. 45 things that I culled from the photos I've taken in the last month alone. Obviously it's not the whole of what the last month of my life has been, nor are they the only things you can do without anything at all. The reason I had to resort to my own photo collection is that given the whole of possibility regarding just my small, few-thousand-people suburb and the several surrounding locations my mind goes nearly blank.
I spent years of my childhood exploring just one of the 3-5 parks within walking distance of my house, and I can say with authority that within that park lies a series of tall-grass areas called "mazes" that hunters go on, a pavilion complete with barbecue equipment and charcoal, series of forested areas that merge with rivers and which are ripe for building things in, two lakes - one hidden from view - a waterfall leading to a lengthy river hike with quite a few natural pools, an old abandoned chapel, a dance hall, a baseball diamond, a mountain overlook, and the entrance to a statewide hike that I've never entirely walked along. And this isn't a huge park, either: I'd say it's a few acres at most. Within several miles of that park are multiple parks that are much bigger that I've never had much of a chance to explore.
On the secluded cul-de-sac where I live there're a good 20 people, including children ranging from infancy to college age; there's a former FBI agent whose hobby is landscaping the house in which he lives; there's a devoutly religious father who travels to foreign countries to help improve lives; there are two families about whom I know nothing whatsoever, who I would get to know better if it weren't for the fact that there are a million other things I want to do first.
Every time I go to New York City, I'm staggered by the knowledge that I could spend months on a single block of the city and not run out of doors to enter, people to meet.
That's not even mentioning the Internet, which I'm rather a fan of and which has millions of communities I'd love to discover. Here we occasionally see articles on how to clamp down on noise, people complaining about reading 200-300 RSS feeds at a time. I read 13 RSS feeds because I've learned that it's impossible to read everything that appears online. Even with those 13, I'm used to spending hours and hours every day exploring new things, talking to people, getting involved in discussions. Trolling fights with lawyers from Taiwan. Arguments like this, where I feel the need to write stuff to people I've never met but still know the names/handles of. People like you.
Tomorrow the plan's to do yoga with some friends, perhaps design a web site or two, possibly go hiking, listen to an album by the Kinks that I haven't heard yet, possibly head over to the library and pick out books at random, see if any of them are worth anything. Chances are much more than that will happen, but I'm not going out of my way to plan things at 4AM. Things will happen. That's all I need to know.
If money was no object, I'd go tour the building of every company I'm infatuated with, then I'd visit all the big cities, drive across country, go to airports and bus stations and taxicabs, meeting people everywhere. I can't even begin to think of what I'd do beyond the United States. I want to see everything. I want to visit small folk villages in Mexico and hitchhike across Europe and maybe learn some languages... But that's beyond my immediate scope, because I know that within a dozen miles of where I'm sitting now, there's a place where I can learn to swing dance and ballroom dance and jazz dance and ballet, and there are jazz clubs and garage spots for screamo bands, music stores where people could tell me how to play any instrument I can get my hands on (music stores that have HARPS in them. Isn't that awesome?), pool halls and barbershops and supermarkets and florists and lots of things I've probably never even thought to think of. I could spend my life in this miniature suburb and never run out of things to do. A barber who's an old friend of my mother's and an old middle school music teacher who plays the flute both spent their lives in this town. I don't think I want to do that, but I know that's always an available option. And jeez, I haven't begun to talk about the various options available given a gorgeous girl and a full gas tank and a picnic blanket, and that's probably another few lifetimes worth of things to try out.
Haven't you ever felt these moments, where you think about everything in existence and feel, like, holy SHIT, there are six billion people in the world and if I wanted to I could meet any one of them? I'm having that feeling right now. Like, I'm writing this to you, and I don't even know you, and you don't know me, but each of us is living a completely different life and we think completely different things, and if I were to meet you we wouldn't know anybody in common or any of the same places and we'd each be talking to a person with a lifetime's worth of fascinating things to explore. That is so cool I can't quite imagine it.
I'm sorry if this was an excessive response to your inquiry, but I think it's silly to say there are only 30-40 things to do. I can think of 30-40 fun things to do without getting up from this couch alone, though I'd rather you not ask me to list all those things.
Nice reply. I agree with you. If you don't know what other things than work you could spend your time on, you either lack imagination, are passionately attracted to your kind of work or are socially inept. Life is just an endless playground of possibillities - a gigantic video game where the objective is to have a good time.
"Having a good time" can mean different things for different people. It could mean getting to know interesting people, mastering one of three hundred million practical skills (one of which is making money), having sex, doing dangerous things (dangerous is fun, incidentally: skydiving, river kayaking), overcoming personal barriers, learning stuff you haven't learned before, taking a second degree, discovering something no one else knows etc etc etc. If you wanted me to detail the list, I could go on forever.
I'm not telling anyone how to live their lives, but if you are bored and don't see any options, you have issues. You're missing out. Get a grip and try something new. Life is supposed to be rewarding.
If you're ever worried, do what I did: Make it a goal to take a picture every day of something you did. Could be as small as yardwork. Just try to make the picture interesting, even if you're not doing anything interesting. If you can't get an interesting picture doing what you're doing, try and carve out 30 minutes to do something fancy.
Lots of it is also a matter of difference of opinion. I used to read some developers' personal blogs and every time they posted a photo, I'd feel some weird envy, even when it was stupid photos. "Oh, man, he and a friend went to buy some milk! I hate that I'm inside living a boring life!" The difference between "Damn it, got to buy some groceries..." and "Voyage to the grocery store!" is more one of perspective than it's one of doing exotic things.
In some cases, I just like being part of the talk. Right now that's Hacker News and Something Awful, because Reddit people frustrate me and the idea of losing days to Metafilter scares me. I'm also a little obsessive re:design. I like clicking every link on every web site to see where it takes me.
In a lot of cases, I like going through a site's history, reading up on its culture. I've spent a day or two going through the YTMND wiki, for instance, and right now I'm looking through the Let's Play Archive, which has quite a lot of fascinating stuff. My favorite moment there so far is http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/OregonTrail/Update%2021/index...., an Oregon Trail run where, to decide a single action at a river, people wrote a hundred or so poems stating their opinions.
> That's approx. 45 things that I culled from the photos I've taken in the last month alone.
Awesome list.
My favorite feature of iPhone software is if you are in the camera roll looking at a picture. If you hold down the backward or forward button for a few seconds, the software will speed through your photographically documented life. like a flip movie of what you've done, where you've been, who you've met.
If you have an iPhone or (better) play with a friend's iPhone, give it a play.
You may think that's a long list...but it isn't. If you had all the free time in the world, you'd get bored of it within a few years. Most of the things you mention, are things you do in the background as you live your life. You might as well say "Go to the grocery store", yeah its an activity, but that's not really the point.
The thing I see from your post is that you like to explore...which can be summed up as one thing. You might enjoy doing this for 1-2 hours in your spare time, but you'll get tired of it, if you had nothing but the free time. It's like eating ice cream, if you eat nothing but ice cream, you'd grow to hate it eventually.
So far I still find grocery stores incredibly exciting. I find it slightly bewildering that people get bored of a store with hundreds of thousands of products.
You may think that's a long list...but it isn't.
Remember when I said hundreds of thousands of things? That still stands. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life cycling through what I just posted; that's just a sampling of the last month of my life. There are hundreds of thousands of things, but it's ridiculous of you to think I'll write all hundreds thousand down in front of you. Sorry. Not a priority.
Or, put another way: So far in my life I've never gotten bored, my parents have never gotten bored, and my grandparents are still traveling the world every week and getting excited, so I'm not worrying too much.
Well what I was looking for was for you to say something like: jump out of an airplane, go scuba diving, drive an F1 car. You know a list of different things. You pretty much just said "Go exploring" a dozen times.
Again: I listed the things I did this month, from my house, with a handful of friends. I won't even try to make a list of super-exciting experiences because there are so many things. When the possibilities range from "learn to sumo wrestle" to "take a silent 10-day meditation retreat in the mountains" to "fire machine guns at things", it's stupid to name everything within that range. The point I was trying to make was that I could be satisfied even with the little exciting things for a long, long time.
Isn't jumping out of an aeroplane exploring? It is exploring a different experience and so are all the things you mentioned and I think that was the point of his post, go find out what is our there so that you may experience different things.
I used to read some developers' personal blogs and every time they posted a photo, I'd feel some weird envy, even when it was stupid photos. "Oh, man, he and a friend went to buy some milk! I hate that I'm inside living a boring life!"
There's a difference between being bored and thinking, erroneously, that your life is boring. It's much easier to complain about being bored than it is to actually be bored.
You seem to be saying that if you're bored, it doesn't mean your life is boring. But if you say your life is boring, does it mean you're bored, or only that your life is boring, or omg neither and can you even be bored if your life is not boring ooohh..
Or maybe you're saying that when someone complains about being bored, he's not actually bored but just thinks he is?
"Twist" this? I'm trying to answer your question. It's not worth cheating in an online dick-waving contest.
I'm saying, very clearly, that complaining about being bored doesn't automatically make your life boring, not when you have the choice of being bored or not. When I spent all day reading other people's blogs, I was missing the fact that they were probably spending just as much time online as I was. The instant I started walking out the door in the morning, I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.
Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.
> Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.
Good idea.
> I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.
All along, I wanted to point out that you contradicted yourself, which was most likely quite apparent to you too.
Claiming that you (and your parents etc) have never been bored in your lives when it's just not true (by your admission too) is, well, disingenuous at best, especially when you do it to embellish how magical your life supposedly is. Your chronicling of all the QuirkyMagical things you've supposedly done felt a bit off too.
We're pretty much all computer nerds here, and we've all wasted quite a bit of our lives feeling bored and sorry for ourselves.
If you've managed to turn your life around and stop wasting time, that's great for you, but to the rest of us, what you've been saying here feels too pretentious, dishonest, or like "rubbing it in", or highlighting your own awesomeness, and none of these things is very classy.
It could be that I'm all alone in thinking this, or it could be that no one else just wanted to say anything, because this is HN and we're all serious and business-like, and you're an intelligent and eloquent fellow.
I wasn't participating in a dick-waving contest though. I just couldn't help but think that you knew exactly what I meant to point out a couple of messages earlier, hence the "twist".
