A counter question to the guy who posted a similar question few hours ago, cause most of the answers weren’t helpful for someone like me, who doesn’t have much money😅.
I love going on hikes or nature walks. Some great free apps are Merlin (for identifying bird calls) and Seek (for identifying plants and animals). All completely free aside from getting to to trail, but even in city parks it can be pretty fun. A good pair of binoculars is a great addition if you have the $$.
I see binoculars at thrift shops all the time for the price of a semi-fancy coffee. Just make sure the lenses are clear and they focus correctly (sometimes the optics are messed up).
Definitely. Also, lots of local birdwatching groups or chapters of the Audubon Society that host pretty frequent outings. Most are free or pretty cheap. Then you have lots of experienced people to ask questions and make friends. Check Facebook or your local photography store flyer posts.
Learn about birds
+1. Birds are flipping awesome. When you get into your 40s, looking at birds hits different. I now get up at 330 in the morning on my days off to look at birds.
Shoplifting can be both fun and profitable
Posetive money hobby
Birding! Cornell’s “Merlin” app is free and an excellent identification/logging tool.
Hiking can be nearly free especially on beginner trails that don’t require special equipment
Writing is something I hated in school but as I’ve gotten older it can be fun to kinda play god with peoples lives.
Cooking isn’t free but could actually save you money if you eat out a lot.
Cooking is actually a really good shout for people who have very limited culinary skills, you don’t need to become a master chef but learning the basics so that you can at some point just look in you’d fridge at a bunch of nearly expired produce and then make something of it.
You will save yourself bigtime cash cooking for yourself if that’s not something you do already fairly routinely
Being able to make a palatable meal with random ingredients that are going to go bad soon is a real skill and super useful. My wife is a master at it and I’ve been trying to get better at it too. I’ve found it pretty easy if it’s all produce but other ingredients absolutely can work too, most ingredients can work together in some capacity if you use them right. Vegetables are just the easiest for me, personally.
Writing fiction is so much fun.
When you start writing, you’re in control, but about 1/3 of the way through a longer story, the characters start taking over and leading the way, to the point that if you’re not careful, they’ll lead you astray from the story you want to write, and they’ll start writing their own story--which may or may not be a better story. If you’ve never experienced this, it’s surprising the first time it happens.
Running costs a pair of shoes every now and then and extra laundry detergent but otherwise free. Like any other hobby you absolutely can spend tons of money on it but it’s not required.
Runkeeper is a free app where you can log down your runs but a casio watch with stopwatch is good enough if you know the distance.
Also, contrary to what a lot of people think you don’t have to push yourself, you can just be easy running (chill jogging) and still make massive gains in endurance, speed, physical health and mental health. Depending on your starting point brisk walking can be sufficient to get started and then transition to “let me just jog a bit” when you feel like it and still have massive gains.
You can even combine it with other hobbies like audiobooks, music and/or podcasts.
Running feels to me like “cleaning the pipes” of the body that’s relaxing and makes the remainder of the day a bit more enjoyable.
I would have started running a lot sooner if someone just told me that it’s actually fun to go slow. Now my slow is my old fast.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realise that if running is not enjoyable then they’re putting way more effort than necessary.
If you have a computer, you can learn to write code. The market for programming is in shambles, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. You can do all sorts of things like make a game, build a personal website, make a custom app, make art, and more
For anyone considering this, Harvard University’s cs50 course is free and invaluable to anyone who wants to pursue these interests.
Invaluable means valuable? What a country!
:P
Invaluable means the value can not be determined, not that it has little value.
yeah lol. I was just quoting the simpsons. “Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”
Speaking of free courses, Nand2Tetris is excellent for learning how CPUs work.
That’s my career 😭. I honestly wish to change careers and do programming just as a hobby, but right now, it’s already what I do.
Roleplaying games. Download a free ruleset and a dice app for your phone and you’re good to go.
Juggling.
Research the shit out of something you are interested in. Go down all the rabbit holes you can find. Compile it into a simpler, better understood synthesis. Convert it into a YouTube vid and deploy. I’d watch anything if well researched.
Foraging. It costs almost nothing to learn about the plants that grow around you and what you can do with them. I’ve been doing it for about 5 years now, and spent maybe $80 on a good hori hori and $40 on a good mortar and pestle when I wanted to get serious. Neither of those are necessary to forage. A good field guide is something you can order at your local library. The main cost is time studying at home and on the field.
Here’s some amazing pesto I made with wild mustard garlic greens.
And the before picture
I can not recommend the hobby enough. I’m happy to try and answer any questions you might have.
Oh man I got to enjoy a chicken of the woods mushroom for the first time last year and it was amazing. We enjoyed sumac tea all summer and have a bounty of hickory nuts this fall. I made wild riverbank grape jelly from grapes harvested from my mom’s backyard. Definitely need to be careful with ID’ing and never picking something you’re not 100% sure of but it’s liberating and satisfying.
This does sound very compelling, but how did you start?
When I go outside in a place that has plants I try to ID at least one that I don’t know. When I get a positive ID on it, I’ll look it up and sometimes it will have edible or medicinal properties.
Fell mouth first into a blueberry bush while hiking
Hehe, I don’t know much but I know those very well. There’s lots of them in Franconia!
Did you know that wolves prefer blueberries to meat?
I unfortunately live too deep inside the city to try that😅. There’s very little vegetation around.
I’m not sure where you are exactly but you’d be shocked. When I was last in New York I actually took an “Urban Foraging Tour”. They showed us these wild weeds that grow on stoops that apparently make a great tea.
I don’t forage as a hobby so obviously this is all just experience from one two hour tour I took like five years ago but still!
You would be surprised. Dandelion for example is a plant that thrives in cities, is entirely edible, and you can roast it’s taproot into a delicious coffee substitute.
I started out with dandelion actually. I made a whole plant tea out of it heat dried. It entirely transformed the plant into something that smelled delicious, almost this floral toasted honey smell.
Just don’t take from places where a lot of pets get walked, right next to roads, or sprayed. Wash everything and anything you take home throughly, and research research research before you start picking.
Garlic mustard can be great, but you have to get it at the right time. It becomes bitter when the plant starts to mature.
While experimenting with it one time I did something resembling Palak Chaat with some tender young leaves. They fried up beautifully and ended up translucent - like green stained glass - and wonderfully crispy.
Do you have a working laptop or desktop? Learn to code. Actually code none of that vibe code bullshit. Making games is fun and rewarding and has an amazing community.
Chess. You can try Lichess, a free (and open source) website/app to play chess. There’s countless of videos and tutorials on the internet about chess.
Thanks, as a person who has never learned how to play chess, Lichess seems like a good start
Chess.com also has a lot of good stuff in the free tier, like lessons and daily puzzles.
And then if you pay money, you can have the full lichess experience!
Just FYI lichess has infinite puzzles, I love doing them.
That website (hereafter referred to as the green pawn website) is very scummy and has ties to gambling. The green pawn website also uses their hoard of played games for their own private analysis, but doesn’t let anyone else do it. Lichess, on the other hand, allows anyone to use the dataset and this has allowed some very interesting things, such as “what is the rarest move” statistics, to be featured in blog posts or YouTube videos.
No hate if you use it, but don’t encourage new players to use the green pawn website. Lichess is leagues better.
Drawing. A pencil, pen, eraser and paper are the type of stuff you could even steal from an office and people wouldn’t bother. Drawing for fun is mostly about just doing whatever or doing caricatures, the latter are great because if it sucks then it’s actually better 😆
Writing. Stories, reviews, fanfics, whatever. You posted here, so you already have everything needed. Literally any working computer will suffice if you prefer a bigger keyboard.
Going out and walking or jogging. Not to any specific place, just literally walking around the place you live, get to visually know the neighborhood. Not fun when it’s too hot outside. Related to walking, bodyweight exercises. Not really fun, but you don’t have to pay anything to workout. Some people make hobbies out of physical exercise, so ymmv.
To add: if pen and paper aren’t your thing you can create computer art with free programs like Blender. Or you can use something like FreeCAD to design objects that are easier bring into the real world via 3D printing or other machines available at most makerspaces (though those are materials and makerspaces will cost something).
To add: Krita and Inkscape are both excellent free programs for making 2D digital art.
That’s assuming the computer even runs those programs, plenty of budget choices don’t even support OpenGL3.
To add to the last point, you can find a humongous amount of instruction videos for any kind of bodyweight exercise on Youtube. Just start clicking around until you find something that works for you. Yoga or calisthenics might be a good place to start.
Geocaching
And while you’re out geocaching, check out Street Complete
OpenStreetMap surveying is an excellent hobby. I’ve been doing it for years.
Its free (somewhat), but the commercialization of it by the geocaching.com assholes has made me sour on it.
I’m a premium member and I find it worth it because I hike a lot. But for people who don’t have expendable income, you can just install the open source geocaching app c:geo, you’ll get a lot more caches than the official app and it will give plenty to find. Additionally, you can email geocaching and they give you a week or 2 weeks of premium, with that time, you can download as many caches offline as you want.
Yeah I know about c:geo, I have it on my phone.
I pretty much just gave up. Geocaching.com ruined it for me. It should just be a wiki and open. But nice to know the tip of two weeks to download.
I remember when it truly was a free hobby. It also was a lot more fun before GPS was on everyone’s phone and you used a separate GPS device.
Well, geocaching here, where I live, may be a completely different or separate thing then, we have our own geocaching repository with mostly small and interesting hides (or virtual caches or multi caches) or educating about your environment. Fully community driven and maintained, free of charge.
That is pretty neat. I always have to use one to 3 sites depending on where I am in the world.
I remember when we used to do CD, DVD, foreign coins and kids toy caches. Those were fun. Now it seems like everytime I check its just a log book at best, or a “scenic” cache.
Yeah, it’s mostly really just a log book or even a code you can check online. But there’s still a chance to find some small kincks-knacks in a Kinder Surprise shell thingy.
