What are things that bring you joy?
goth latinas
Oh yes
Not having to go to work, quit work at 40, am now 60.
How did you do it?
Speedball lines of opiates and cocaine.
Honestly I don’t remember anymore. Everything seems exhausting to me.
This thread has been very wholesome. Good to see people living good lives. Usually my feed is just doom and gloom so thanks for this post OP.
Oh one thing I just remembered, anime. It still brings me joy.
Crashing fresh ice. Especially the one that has air underneath. It crackles really nice. It is very satisfying experience.
Every morning my two youngest kids (under 5) get up around 7:00 AM. The first thing they want to do is sit on my lap in the recliner while I either read to them or turn on one of their TV shows and we just chill for an hour. We do this every day and it’s my favorite part of the day.
Books. This year I’ve caught up with harry Dresden and Carl & doughnut. Piranesi was great. A solid recommend. Sanderson’s Tailored Realities was a nice collection of snapshots into different parts of his universe
Dungeon Crawler Carl has to be one of my top two favorite reads in the last year (I’d give it the top spot, but Red Rising was also really good)! It’s a struggle to convey just what makes it so good, but it’s been a fantastic ride. I can’t wait for the next book in May!
I started the first book February 3rd after a podcaster I listen to casually mentioned it and said it was a great read. I’m on the 7th book now 😂
Looking forward to the new book! DCC 😁
I’m a simple man… I see a cat and I pet it. This makes the brain produce the happy juice.
Toddlers. Seeing toddlers stumbling about and discovering their world is fascinating to me.
I know a toddler. He’s so fucking charming and positive. He could be a talkshow host.
When I met my wife, she loved going to theaters to see kids see something amazing for the first time.
She’s so wonderful.
Similar but different, we have a kitten and it’s funny to see him trying to figure things out. The other day he just stared at our Keurig when I was making coffee. We don’t use it that often and I guess he hadn’t seen it in action before.
To crush ny enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women!
Oh, hey, OP! I, too, enjoy touching paintings w/ a bone-dry brush and then holding still in the moment. 😶
maybe OP heard of dry brushing and got a little confused
During the Covid Quarantine, I took up the guitar again, after having quit playing decades ago. I was terrible back then, but I’ve practiced every day, and become pretty good.
My primary objective was to be able to sit and play my guitar good enough to entertain myself, and I’ve accomplished it. I can fingerpick about 30 songs start to finish, most with my own arrangements, and about 5 originals that I think are pretty good. I’ve also become a credible lead guitarist as well. Lately I’ve been getting into recording.
Nothing is more satisfying than sitting on the front porch at sunset, looking out over the pond across from my house, and fingerpick through some favorite songs, and work on new ones. By playing the guitar instead of eating, I’ve lost 100 pounds, and I’m still going. It’s also been remarkable for my mental health.
I feel this. I started playing the piano again early in the pandemic. I did not appreciate it when I was a kid and my mom made us each practice for an hour a day but I appreciate it now.
Having a creative outlet like a musical instrument has been amazing for maintaining a healthy, less cynical mental outlook. I took a similar break for a real long time and picked it up again a couple years ago and it’s been fun but takes determination to keep it up.
My secret was to play for 20 minutes in the morning when I first got up, 20 at night before going to bed, and 20 minutes somewhere during the day. That gives you 60 minutes a day.
You’re really only focused for about 20 minutes anyway, so after that youre basically wasting your time anyway. Better to get three focused sessions per day, than one long one where you weren’t really concentrating for most of it. And if you miss a short session, you only miss a little, you don’t skip an entire day.
Force yourself to do that for 2-3 weeks, and it will become a positive habit that will feel weird if you skip it. Hopefully, you are so motivated to go on your musical journey that you won’t need to convince yourself too much, but it also helps that your progress will be so fast that it will become self-motivating.
Eventually, I got away from that schedule, because I was playing a lot more than that per day anyway. I’ve became a bit obsessed.
3 x 20 min per day. That’s what I did, and I was shocked at how quickly I progressed.
That sounds pretty similar, the first few months i’d go from lots of playing and practicing for a few weeks then nothing then coming back to it for a couple weeks etc never making very much progress. Now I do a session in the morning for around 20 min to do some practice for techniques and play a recent song I learned or am working on.
Then in the evening a mix of stuff for around an hour. I try to keep 3 things going: 1 technique to practice (currently working on tapping), 1 new or recent song to practice (having fun with sanguisugabog’s dead as shit), and song writing or playing to a backing track so if I get bored or stuck on 1 I have 2 others to pick from. If I get away from it for a couple days it feels weird and I get more structured about at least 2 20 min sessions in the morning and evening.
That sounds pretty similar to the kinds of things I was practicing for a while, and I was improving well.
Then I caught the acoustic bug, and really got into it. I still played electric, but much less. A couple of months ago, though, I started playing more electric again, and bringing a lot of finger picking techniques to electric playing, so it looks like that’s the next stage for me. I’ve always liked the hybrid picking of people like Knopfler or Buckingham.
Tapping hasn’t grabbed me yet. I’m sure I’ll get inspired one day, and go down that path at that point.
Mostly simple stuff
An entertaining or educational book, a good philosophical argument, enjoying moments of good health, leisure, and company, the double barrel shotgun in doom, learning a new song or technique on the guitar and using it to create my own stuff, warm socks and cold coffee, figuring out a bug or defect in a program.
Books, good food, a good laugh, and my best friend. These are things that come to mind straight away, but there are certainly many others!
Helping others, having friendly interactions with people (online and offline), birds landing on your outstretched hand, when a happy dog looks up at you with their happy smiles, when a cat comes to see you after the owner says “She’s nervous around strangers”,… A solid sleep and feeling refreshed in the morning.
A good coffee, a cold drink on a hot day, when a seed has sprouted in my garden, a hefty burrito, a heavy thunderstorm, sunshine after days of rain, the cooling 5PM breeze on a stinking hot day, ibuprofen working on a headache, when you go shopping and one of the first things you try on fits really well so you don’t have to shop for hours, the first run down the hill (snow), when you come across a steal of a deal on something you’ve been wanting,… Too many to name.
What doesn’t bring me joy is when I need cold water from the tap and hot water comes out, or if the empty toilet roll hasn’t been replaced. 💀
Seeing animals, especially in the wild, especially birds. I like to think of every sighting as good luck.
