‘What hobby looks peaceful from the outside but is pure stress once you get into it?’ – 22 ‘relaxing’ pastimes that will give you a nervous breakdown

A hobby is an activity that you do in your downtime, a chance to relax and take your mind off the pressures of work and day-to-day life.

Well, it’s meant to be. But if the answers to this question posed by Stukwan on the AskReddit page are anything to go by, sometimes it’s the exact opposite…

‘What’s a hobby that looks incredibly peaceful from the outside, but is actually pure stress once you get into it?’

Check out these replies from people who wish they’d stuck to doomscrolling instead…

1.

‘Fish tanks.’
–EmploymentNegative59

2.

‘Bonsai. People think it’s all Zen and peaceful but the work on the trees is actually very intense.’
–RevShiver

3.

‘Houseplants in general can be this way. I’ve changed nothing- why has my alocasia dropped six leaves this week?! Oh, it was mildly cloudy on Tuesday and Gemini was in Mars or something.’
–ShinyUnicornPoo

4.

‘Not pure stress, but because of the scarcity of waves per capita, surfing is often more aggressive/angry than it should be. Lots of people in a gorgeous environment doing a fun thing and yelling at each other.’
–thalassicus

5.

‘Woodworking. The videos show five quiet minutes of hand-planing; they skip the hour spent measuring, re-measuring, and realising the board moved anyway.’
–Level-Historian6435

6.

‘I love my sewing machine because it doesn’t react to the obscenities I spew while using it.’
–starbage_

7.

‘Reef tanks. Everything costs a fortune, many of your lifeforms are very delicate and particular in their needs, you have to keep track of and manage a dozen parameters, and there are many, many mistakes to be made where everything in your tank suffers or dies.

‘It’s more like keeping an intensive care patient alive with a bunch of machines. But damn are they amazing.’
–blinkysmurf

8.

‘Well making coffee apparently, I just bought an espresso machine. According to the internet if my beans are more than a week old, I don’t weight out my beans EXACTLY, and use some kind of spiky comb thing on the grinds before I extract, my coffee will literally be undrinkable.’
–MastodonPristine8986

9.

‘Gardening. It looks like quietly watering plants until you realise you’ve declared war on bugs, weather, fungus, and squirrels.’
–Potential-Poem453

10.

‘Anything that involves horses. They’re out to injure themselves in the most stupid, devastating, and expensive way possible.’
–a-5-6-7-8

11.

‘Beekeeping consists mostly of trying to keep your hive alive. And if you’re too successful half of them fuck off and leave.’
–garrettj100

12.

‘Gaming I would say. Some are chill, solo games are chill.

‘Online competitive games become a bunch of little edgelord Nazis shouting at everyone else for being bad… Because they’ve lost their last 20 games in a row.’
–-UsernameHere