Actively engaging with interests
One of my favorite activities online is to follow people who go deep into their hobbies and interests. I enjoy reading and watching material from people who do cool stuff in their free time: reading challenges and gathering big personal book collections, programming and writing free software for public benefit, personal blogs, photography, drawing, etc.
Over time, I have gathered a list of such people and check their work regularly. Two examples on my list who inspire me a lot are:
73pctgeek who has shared daily drawings for almost 1000 days so far. This blog was one of reasons I took a drawing book to try learning to draw again.
There is a guy on YouTube, shortly before his retirement, who learns an equivalent material to an undergraduate math curriculum on his own. He is now 3 years into this, and makes simple videos of topics and books he is currently learning.
I wish that I could dive deeply into one of my many personal interests just because it is fun to do so.
I believe there is a satisfying feeling when I go deeply into a topic that genuinely interests me. Maybe this is a response from my mind, which rejects all the shallow news, pointless Youtube videos, social media posts, and webpages on search engines pushed to me, not because I wanted to see them, but because they want to make profit from my attention. Or maybe this is a desire to decide actively what to do with my free time.
It is a daily decision to let the shallow amusements go, and engage with an interest. In the short run, the shallow amusements give us more pleasure, but the long-term satisfaction of actively engaging with or following a personal interest is much higher. I try to be more conscious with this and purse more depth that short-term amusement in the free hours of day and weekends that I get.