Bang your head. Or not

The body is one part to keep busy, the brain another. Muscles need downtime after sports, and that time can be used for more cerebral hobbies. And just like sports, there are tangible benefits to it:

• Stress management.

• Anxiety reduction.

• Improving creativity.

• Personal fulfillment by succeeding at learning or creating something new.

• Mood improvement.

As for which hobby, welp, guess what I’m about to say. And if nothing comes to mind, don’t be afraid to try out activities that don’t elicit immediate interest.

Learning a new language

For your job, for a vacation, for the beauty of speaking several languages. Phone or computer apps serve as good starting points when you’re less than a beginner in a language you’d like to learn.

Apps will get you a weekly dose of new words. Once you have some basics, you can supplement your daily dose of language-learning with other exercises like watching subtitled movies, reading books and e-books with the same text written twice, once in your language and once in the one you’re learning, and podcasts.

More engaging, and pricier, are online and live courses. Some universities allow for affordable evening classes, but that depends on where you live. The ideal solution is to be immersed in said language by virtue of living in a country speaking it, but unless you have an opportunity to work abroad, this one’s complicated.

Apps like Duolingo or Babel have both free and paid versions, the free versions are enough for a beginner.

Relevant short-term goals:

• Learn ten new words every week.

• Know enough to understand basic stories in a foreign language.

• Pick up books or e-books with a story in the language you’d like to learn on one page and in your native language on the other, and read a couple pages each evening before going to bed.

Relevant long-term goals:

• Read stories or watch movies in a foreign language without subtitles on.

• Know enough to hold conversations while on vacation in a foreign country.

Even more long-term:

• Work abroad.

Memory Training

Learning how to better commit things to memory is a practical skill for life in general and can be a fun hobby in and itself. It’s also useful to recall where you put the car keys. Remember that time when you did your homework by reading, re-reading and reading the same text again until it either remained stuck in your brain or you fell asleep? Turns out there are many methods on how go about it.

One method is the mind palace, which you might know about if you watched the Sherlock series or read the Hannibal Lecter books. Pick a place you know very well, for example your parent’s house, your own place, or the village of your youth. It’s important to be familiar with it, because you will make use of all the elements of the place: doors, cupboards, beds, fountains, and so on. Make a logical path, going from one furniture to the next, or one house to the next. Now, translate what you want to remember in a way that makes it impactful.

Here’s an example from the stuff I had to learn for exams: philosopher John Rawls imagined a social experiment where the participants had to devise an ideal society, but they didn’t know who they would be or what place they would hold in that society. Healthy, cripple, born rich or poor, man or woman, and so on. With this 'veil of ignorance', people made certain to improve the worst positions and ensured that what inequalities existed served the common good.

This is how I walk through my bedroom: I go from the double bed to the nightstand to the desk. On the bed is man standing on a giant, raw steak walking around with hands outstretched because he’s wearing a blindfold. Raw meat helps me remember the name Rawls; the blindfold represents the veil of ignorance used in Rawls’ experiment. John’s an easy name to remember so that’s okay for me. On the nightstand is the shape of a human being tossing a coin in the air. The result will decide if he’ll be the pauper or the rich guy standing right before him. On the desk is a circle of miniature people huddled close together, symbolizing how participants chose the widest baseline rights for everyone. Walking the path gives me the philosopher’s name, the study’s parameters and the results.

You can set a room apart to remember daily stuff like groceries, to wipe clean each time you’re done buying them, and keep other rooms for long-term information. Walk the room following the same path from furniture to furniture daily, so that the information imprints into your brain. Over time, you will be able to summon the knowledge without requiring the room, and you can then wipe it clean for the next batch of material.

This is one method. The internet provides a wealth of them and books will usually go to greater lengths and depths. One such book is How to develop a perfect memory by Dominic O’Brien. He touches on several methods and has a tendency to champion his own homebrew approach, which at times reads suspiciously like a sales speech. Still, when the author manages to keep his inner brand manager in check, he provides good insight into the various ways memory can be improved.

Relevant short-term goals:

• Read about various methods, pick one out and work on it daily for two weeks.

• Write your grocery list down but also commit it to memory with the method you’re working on. Only check the list once your shopping cart is full to see if you got it right.

Relevant long-term goals:

• Adopt one or several methods over several months. You will get more mileage out of it if you’re working in a field or hobby that requires you to commit things to memory. If you’re studying, even better.

Reading

If you ever thought about making a list of books to read through during a year, now’s your chance. Pick a time of day, an hour or two or more only for reading. Make a list of the books you absolutely want to read. Will it be known classics that you wish to read for your own culture, even if it’s not a genre that would normally get your attention? Perhaps those books in your backlog that have been rotting away for ages. Immerse yourself into another world and finally read as much as you always wanted to.

If you commute for work but feel bored with the radio or your current playlist or are cooking and would like a smooth voice to carry you while you cut that carrot into fine pieces, audio-books work just as well. Fun way to discover new stories you wouldn’t have otherwise touched is to start enjoying the narrator’s voice and check his other works just to hear some more of them.

Relevant goals:

• Set aside an hour aside each day to read. Or one hour in the morning and one in the evening.

• Read one book per month.

Become a philosopher, think life, absorb general knowledge to have historical and cultural data to frame current events

Sounds pompous, and if someone says they are a philosopher with a straight face, it often is. I’m not fond of the image that philosophers only preoccupy themselves with the big, complicated questions. Philosophy means love of wisdom, and wisdom is manifold. To know what you want to do in life is a sign of wisdom, philosophy can be done with the great and the little things alike.

I put philosophy and general knowledge and culture together, because knowledge of the past and of cultural movements helps to understand and think about over events, situations, and human behavior. Knowledge and wisdom go hand in hand, and they are used to examine life and the world with a critical eye.

In the same vein, “I don’t read up on old thinkers because I want to think for myself” is a fallacy. Reading up on other philosophers helps you in finding out blind spots and inconsistencies in your own thought patterns. To know what others think and what you agree and disagree with helps in shaping your own thoughts.

Not reading up on others makes you susceptible to manipulation, and that’s the opposite of thinking for yourself. Incidentally, cognitive biases are an excellent subject to learn about and learn about one’s own potential shortcomings. It doesn’t just take questioning everything, you must also be free of prejudice, biases and dogma.

Imagining myself as that bearded old man contemplating stuff is fun, even if my beard is not as smooth as I’d like it to be. I started reading about a variety of random topics, a lot of them are boring as hell to me, yet I always reach the stage that has me delve deeper into one aspect of sociology or whatnot and it occupies me for some days to come. My knowledge is full of holes and more a patchwork than a deep collected sea. Does it help me about my lack of romantic love and moments of loneliness? I dunno, but it’s fun to put things in perspective and realize how the decried wokism of today is the successor of cosmopolitanism, a trait of big cities hated by rural areas. Go further back and you realize wokism may be a new buzzword but the reasons for its existence and the mechanics behind are old as hell.

Reading is the basis of philosophy, the objectives in the reading section can be applied here as well. Doesn’t have to be dry essays either, works of literature are also based in philosophy currents, and reading up an analysis of a piece of work you enjoy can be the entry to a wider school of thought.

Instead of delving into one school, introduction books to philosophy aim to teach broadly about the classics and great thinkers and are a great place to start. Avoid the internet though, jumping from one page to the next produces shallow trivia and is closer to doom-scrolling than learning.

General knowledge is broader, for this I prefer podcasts and magazines rather than big books. It’s the hit and miss method, I tried out several in my native language until I found a podcast on sociology and biology and a magazine about culture through the ages I’m sticking with.