Performing. I’m a circus performer by night. My day job sucks the life out of me, but it pays the bills. My night job keeps me going and helps me make friends and connections.

As an expansion of that, art is my absolute passion. I do not feel alive if I can’t express myself creatively.

I have never experienced such things, at least from what others have said what those things are, people try to explain it to me and it doesn’t make much sense. I can understand passion but joy and happiness is such a odd concept to me. Like what gives me dopamine? Or things that you feel “good inside”. It’s all so confusing.

Powered paragliding

I enjoy unstructured time where Im not worried about something I should be doing. Its a massive rarity but its great to just be in the moment. Lying in the sun or shade, having a leasurely stroll or swim or bike ride. Walking or playing with the dog. Simple things really.

I like gunsmithing. Hear me out! Got loads of guns, mostly pieces of shit I got off guns.com by sorting low > high. Got a new one last night, please don’t tell my wife. Only $200, tax, tag and title, but I really shouldn’t be blowing money ATM.

1950s bolt-action, 12-gague. (That’s a type of shotgun for my European friends.) Already had both an antique 12 and 20 bolt-action, screwed one way or another, haven’t figured out how to fix 'em.

Thing I love is that gunsmithing both fits and stretches my skill sets. I suck at woodworking, but I’ve done some really cool shit none the less. Metalworking? Good lord no, I can barely get anything done. SUPER proud of successfully sawing off (legally) a shotgun. Mechanically speaking? I’m flat out retarded, and I mean that. Only part of the primary school tests I did poorly on was, “rotate these shapes to fit together”. It’s embarrassing! Sometimes I gotta get my young friend across the street. “Yeah, took it apart quick enough, can’t figure this bit out.” Couldn’t instinctively tell my left from right until my late 40s. Sometimes I still have to skip a beat, think on it.

Gunsmithing takes every skill I got, and I often fail, springs everywhere! But I can push through to the win often enough to get that satisfaction. Easily can take a week of evenings to get an old gun setup. Perfect hobby to fart around with while watching a movie.

Happiness for spending time with my family, passion to listen and discover new music, joy helping others as much as I can and saying stupid funny stuff!

It;s not that you don’t have happiness, passion or even joy my dude, its that you still haven’t found it! Never give up!

Video games and “making things work”/tinkering.

Getting to learn what makes something tick and then making it tick (again, usually) or modifying it (mostly via software) is a lot of fun for me. I still haven’t quite gotten networking down yet but it’s my next thing to master since I want to set up my own server.

That and baking/feeding the people I love. Taking on a new baking challenge is especially fun. Cakes are my favorite to make. Candy making is on my bucket list as well.

Making anything. All of my hobbies are making. Making pickles or beer or bread or dried snacks or canned jams. Designing and 3d printing my own widgets. Organizing and cleaning. Structure.

A few things.

If we look beyond my family, reading is a big passion of mine. This is more audiobooks lately due to the aforementioned family, but whatever keeps the hobby going.

I enjoy movies and have a nice surround sound setup at home. That can eat up a lot of time, just reading about how to improve, not to mention actually using it for both movies and music (again the family can make this difficult to achieve).

I really like photography and have a few of my own pictures hanging on the walls. I have spent hours at a time hunting for great photos, not to mention photo marathons where you take a walk for 12 or 24 hours with your camera.

I enjoy biking. I bike to work every day. When we had the time my wife and I went on longer rides up towards 100km. Small kids have killed the longer trips, but the daily commute lives on!

I recently got into home assistant, automating many a thing, preferably without pissing off the wife too much. That’s a precarious balance act, but for now we’re still together, so I haven’t messed up too badly - yet.

I might have left something out, and I know I had other passions that were left behind as my attention shifted that I haven’t mentioned. Lots going on always!

Crawling into bed early in the evening with a glass of wine and a good book.

At the moment, bugger all. Currently in therapy for my PTSD and apparently my chronic “life is infuriatingly boring and nothing is worth doing”-ness is not normal and a side effect of having dealt with as much trauma as I have. Dunno where to go from here, really.

Seeing my kids happy and growing as a parent. I’ve put a lot of effort into learning better parenting and better understanding my neurodiverse kid. I’m really pleased about the progress I’ve made, but equally I’m getting increasingly horrified at how bad I used to be.

Making something. Building wardrobe, making a desk, soldering a custom keyboard kit, making a DIY hitbox game controller, put together a gaming PC, put together a home server, made a website, wrote some support material for younger people giving exams in my professional field, etc.

Or learning about things. Reading non-fiction books, watching educational youtube channels, listening to podcasts, learning to use Linux, etc.

Achieving something meaningful at work.