[rwskclob] Mental hobby

If you wanted to pick one mental hobby to learn to do well, to exercise your brain, what should it be?

There are games: chess, poker, Set, Scrabble, etc.  There are online games: WoW.  There are video and computer games of many types and forms.  There are solitaire puzzles: sudoku, crosswords, Rubik's cube.  There is reading, though the mind is probably less actively engaged.

No, I encourage none of these.  Choose a hobby that's creative in an open-ended way.  There are the zillion media of art: draw, paint, sculpt, make videos and animation, compose music, write (like this) instead of read.  Many can be done on the computer if you wish: Lilypond, The GIMP, Blender.

There are also the zillion forms of engineering hobbies.  Build!  Learn to computer program.

If you have a competitive streak which would have been spent on a competitive game, there are competitions for many of these creative hobbies, e.g., computer programming contests.

By creating, you have the potential to contribute to human civilization in a way that solving sudoku puzzles does not.

If you create, may I interest you in licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons.