After spending months in isolation, people jumped at the opportunity to share their most ridiculous new habits! Here are some of the most ~unique~ hobbies people started during the pandemic:
1. “I don’t eat the middles of Oreos. I save them.”
2. “The whole family is in on it like a communal descent into madness. We have a plastic duck. Her name is Martha. We move her around the house and then act like she got there on her own."
3. “I live near an airport and at the beginning of the pandemic I downloaded this app that lets you check local airplane radar. Now, every time that I hear a plane go by overhead, I check the app to see where they were coming from and I imagine what it would be like if I were in that place right now.”
4. “I found this thing online about this person who kept feeding the neighborhood crows and eventually they would start to bring her gifts like little bottle caps or shiny things. And I’ve been walking around the neighborhood a lot so I figured, why not? So I just kept buying huge bags of peanuts to bring with me on my walks. And then, anytime I’d see a crow, I’d throw out handfuls of peanuts through the neighborhood. Literally just in the hopes they’ll start bringing me garbage gifts."
5. “I’ve been obsessed with the turkeys that live outside my bedroom window and every day at sundown I watch them. It’s become a ritual. I call this 'Turkey Time.' And it’s gotten to the point where if for some reason, due to bad weather or something, the turkeys aren’t here, I feel like my world is crumbling. They are comfort turkeys.”
6. “There’s a group of squirrels that bury their nuts in my little backyard. I gave them all names, back stories and a clan rivalry."
7. “I have this one blonde eyebrow hair that grows super long and I used to pluck it, but now I just let it grow out. It’s probably over an inch. It’s already fallen out naturally once so it’ll probably fall out soon, but I just love it.”
8. “I bought my cat and I matching red silk robes and I put them on us on Sundays to watch true crime shows.”
9. “I started peeling an absolutely ridiculous amount of citrus in the morning to give to my family so that we could ward off scurvy.”
10. “I rent a place by the lake, but I can’t afford a boat. I can’t go boating and I can’t go fishing because I’m vegan. So everyday during my quarantine summer I would come out on my porch and wait for boats to go by. As the boats went by I would pay attention to what songs they were playing and I would count that as fishing for songs. I put them all on a little playlist.”
11. “I tell my dog everything about my life. And when I feel like she has done her fair share of emotional labor for me, I go to my rabbit and I tell him stuff as well.”
12. “I abandoned all my previously held beliefs about religion, politics, gender identity, and sexual orientation…oh, and I started painting wine bottles!”
13. “So for the past six months, every night I go down to the Mississippi River and I stare at the huge container ships that go by. And then just like any date, I have to google them. So I log on to marinetraffic.com to see where they’re coming from or going to. And they’re all coming from really exotic places like Hamburg, the Cape of Good Hope, or Trenton, New Jersey – just, like, really cool places that we can’t go to right now. I’m in so deep that now I’ve read three nonfiction books about container ships."
14. “That would be the rubber band ball made from each broccoli that we’ve eaten during the pandemic.”
15. “Practicing my goat face. Would you like to see?”
16. “I put my Christmas tree up and I haven’t taken it down. It’s almost been up for a year and I’ve changed the ornaments every few weeks.”
17. “I don’t sleep through the night so at 3 a.m. I get up and eat the croissant on my nightstand. So instead of witching hour, it’s the croissant hour.”
18. “I put my stuffed animals in chairs and give them mugs so it feels like I’m working in a coffee shop, when I’m actually desperately alone.”
19. “Before I moved, I would go for a sunset walk every night behind my house and write the names of the people I hate in the sand.”
20. “FaceTiming men on dating apps without warning.”
21. “I’m an essential worker and where I work they don’t mandate our customers to wear masks so I deal with a lot of stress. So now on my Sunday I draw a hot bubble bath with epsom salt and light some candles. I put my laptop out, turn on a good show, and I make some good dinner – like something I love. And I eat my dinner in the bathtub.”
22. “I got cowgirl boots to wear while watching a horse show on Netflix.”
23. “I learned what all the birds mean according to native mythology and now I use them to predict the weather.”
24. "I eat the end of the bread loaves at the end of the day."
25. “Whenever I’m alone for too long and watching TV by myself [and] I have a thought about what I’m watching I will pause the TV. Pause it, look to my left as if someone is sitting there, and I will argue with myself about my opinions on the show. There’s no one there. I only play the show when I’m done saying my thought.”
26. “I started taking shots of maple syrup whenever I get stressed.”
Responses have been edited for length/clarity.