Mine is nostalgia. That’s literally my copium drug and it really is strong some days. It’s not that I sit here everyday and never move on to newer things, I do sometimes embrace new things and realize there’s more out there than what I have.
It’s just, there’s an online radio show I still listen to, to this day and it’s episodes are like 17 years old and been out of syndication for a good long while now with no hope of returning. It’s like my time capsule that opens up so much in my mind, so many memories, so many what-ifs to think about, bringing me back to where things were in that time period .etc
And it’s something I just don’t think I’ll ever let go because as much as I’ve tried to find a place in this awfully trashed world, I’m always winding back at square one because either I’m incompatible or it is incompatible with me.
I just want to go back to the 2000s and do it all over again and meet who I know now just to see how things could’ve gone if we’ve all met earlier.
Hobbies, self-confidence, and selective apathy.
Antidepressants
This is gonna sound silly, but feeding the local birds is really therapeutical. For the span of a moment it’s not about you, it’s about the simplicity of feeding an animal you don’t know, that will likely not care if you come back. No strings attached.
I used to wonder why old people do that, now I get it. It just feels nice.
A word of advice though if you plan on doing that, look up what you should and should not feed wild animals. Bread is supposedly terrible for ducks. And crows will go crazy about peanuts. Funny to see them crack them open too.
Simple, short term pleasures, abandoning of long term plans, and taking comfort in the fact that I have not (and will not) bring children into this world.
Videogames and copious amounts of THC
What radio program?
I still listen to This Week in Tech which has been going since early 2000s.
This is going to be hard to explain. So I’ll just simply say - go look for a show called 2 Sense, all of the episodes are available on Internet Archive. It was a very niche show that was hosted by a furry named 2 The Ranting Gryphon.
This is an online radio show that predates a tiny bit before podcasting as a term and as a form of entertainment began to gain ground. I’ll warn you that, yes some of the content on that show will not be what you’d expect. A lot of the content on that show will be politically incorrect. A lot of content on that show will come off as juvenile and immature at times, if not entire shows.
But this is the kind of show I listen to annually that just drives me back in time. Not because I particularly was in favor of the personalities of this show or anything. But it’s the things they cover and talk about that I reflect on sometimes compared to where things are now in the world and society.
I wasn’t even an active listener of this show until about 2008, towards the tail end of it’s second run. And quite frankly, listening to those episodes are very unbearable to me now because the content from 2007-2008 of the episodes are very loose and it really became a soapbox for the primary host, 2 Gryphon, to start airing out his most raw takes on how he feels about certain groups of people.