Asklemmy

I'd love to spend more time planting trees. I volunteer to do it occasionally on weekends but I really love the process of going from sprout to seedling to planted. I just wish I could do more of it.

I would do loads of degrees. History, English, Psychology, Politics, Spanish, etc. Having the brain space to focus on learning would be amazing. I did my masters part time while working full time and it was a nightmare. Glad I did it but I couldn't do my best as I was bogged down in work stuff.

I would also like to learn more languages. I do a bit of Spanish and Danish when I can but I rarely have the mental energy after work.

Travel too. Maybe write a book.

Gymnastics, surfing, and study and write philosophical works. And maybe practice guitar.

Same thing I do now, but instead of full-time work / part-time student, I'd flip it to part-time work and full-time student.

I'm hanging on to the bottom step of the medical ladder - this field is fascinating as fuck, and even as just a tech I get a lot of satisfaction in my role (albeit minor relative to doctors or nurses) in helping others recover from whatever sickness/injury they present with.

Without the financial barriers and current need to work till exhaustion to afford rent, I'd be highly interested in going all the way to physician, but at the rate I'm able to actually afford the time and money to take classes, I'll be pushing 40 when I'm able to clear the hurdle from tech to nurse; and it already hurts to move half of my fucking joints, so once this nursing shit is finished, I don't see myself climbing any more ladders, literal or otherwise... at that point it'll just be the counting the days till retirement or planning out the most pleasurable way to commit suicide.

I would, in no certain order:

• Work at a coffee shop part time making coffee for people. Preferably a locally owned shop, but it wouldn't matter too much if not.
• Work as a bartender similarly as above
• Potentially garden if I have the time and interest for it
• Create more YouTube videos
• Write, record, and release more music
• Learn to paint
• Get a film camera and take photos with it
• Contribute to FLOSS projects
• Finally make that D&D table that doubles as a dining table that I've been wanting to make for a few months now
• Actually follow through on learning my several languages I'm working on learning
• Become an interpreter (probably in ASL)
• Develop video games
• Create more art in general
• Do research on how art and society mingle together and interact

my world could be different if I owned my time

Self ownership is the basis of capitalism and you're already playing the game, you're just playing it bad.

if you're on hourly I want you to ask yourself if you would pay someone else what you earn at work to do whatever you just did in the last hour.
if not why not? did you explicitly set aside this time to be unproductive? do you think people doing better than you let themselves slide like that?

Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day

Speak for yourself, I love having a routine and getting in the zone. Autonomy and Mastery are worth more to me than money.

I'm an intellectually overqualified filmmaker surrounded by anti-intellectuals (I routinely get made fun of for being interested in technical stuff)....and right now, I am on workman's comp with a broken foot. So: exactly what I am doing right now is exactly what I would want to be doing.

What's that?
Hanging out with my daughter in my lab,

Learning

• Haskell/Plutus
• Purescript
• using Nix to glue them together
• hacking an espresso machine (either with a RISC_V Lychee Pi or an ESP32...haven't decided yet).

Practicing:

• guitar

Blazing:

• chronic

I'd be writing a lot more music

Probably sleep or do gamedev in a full time fashion.

I would love to do more with animation especially non-traditional animation like LED or Pinscreen, but the barrier of entry is just too high.

If I could start from scratch, maybe something. In my current condition I would probably just feel unproductive and guilty every day, with no personal direction of my own.

Something new every day. Create. Spend time with my children. Volunteer my time and knowledge.

I'd hang out and enjoy the fruits of other people's time being sold. Pretty hard to think of a hobby that wouldn't cover.

I'd probably still be a mechanical engineer, but maybe I could have gotten some more education in the direction of nuclear power and/or automation. I might have also had another kid instead of just one.

Edit: I'd also like to learn and get good at welding. It would be cool to not only engineer a nuclear power plant, but to help actually build it as well. Then again, I'd probably never get good enough at welding to do so unless I devoted myself to the trade. Maybe I could just get some shifts as a plant operator after it's built.