So I like plants and gardening. My appartment is full of plants and I have a small herb nursery in my window sill. I’m currently growing three basil plants and a pepper plant.
I go to social media for tips and tricks and as usual it’s full of people with grade A set ups producing lots of herbs and veggies and stuff. I started growing my pepper plant and after weeks I managed to produce a whopping number of 1 pepper. The weird thought that occurred to me was: I failed. I failed because my pepper plant isn’t as productive as the plants I see online.
Meanwhile: did I have fun doing this? Yes, I loved watching the progress of this plant. I did feel cool when I added my home grown pepper to my dinner. Isn’t that what hobbies are about?
How many people are out there quitting things because they aren’t immediately good at it because social media primed us to crave instant satisfaction through constant dopamine hits? Pick up hobbies, be bad at them, learn, have fun.
Your one pepper:
It’s not social media, but the general mercification of every aspect of human life that we are seeing under a last-stage capitlistic society. Social media is “just” one of the main communication medium and that’s why you see it like an ideological source.
Fight against that, as much as you can. You should spend your time with things you find personally valuable for yourself and the people you love, do not use productivity as a worth criteria!
I enjoy my hobbies a lot more now that I don’t engage with those topics on social media. It wasn’t so much the constant dopamine hit of social media interactions but the constant elitism. It’s not a competition and it’s never going to be a job, if it were either of those things it wouldn’t be a hobby and I wouldn’t be doing it.
I’ve been nursing a chili pepper plant (several actually) from seeds I brought back home. It’s going on its third year and produced lots of fruit in the second year, though they tend to be smallish (I think they could become bigger). I think I got some fruit from the hardiest stems in the first year, some of them grew really big and others are slowly dying. I didn’t know how many seeds I needed to plant so I just chucked a bunch in a pot and months later I have 11 stems growing lol.
The great thing about chili plants is they’re hardy af and don’t really have predators, since capsicaine is their defense mechanism. Really easy to take care of, it’s like there’s no such thing as too much or too little water for these plants.
Your plant is probably going to give more fruit next year. You can also add more stems to the pot like I did with mine, but I really only have two plants giving fruit. Harvest the peppers while they’re still green once they’ve reached an ideal size or size they don’t seem to grow out of, and let them ripen in a sunlit area. You need to harvest the fruit for the plant to make more. Don’t touch the flowers.
I want to try NPK fertilizer but I’m otherwise a terrible gardener lol and it feels daunting to use the thing. I just give it water and while it likes having a lot of it, I find that I don’t have to give it all this water, it can also go several days without water (apparently it makes the fruit more spicy as well). Right now it’s inside for winter and so it’s not producing any fruit, but once I put it back outside when it becomes warmer at night it’ll start producing tons of flowers. It comes from a country where there is no such thing as winter so it could totally grow fruit year-round.
Dry the peppers in the oven btw if you don’t use them instantly. They’re not like store-bought peppers and will rot very quickly. Just chuck them in the oven at 50-60C for 2-3 hours (yes, ovens go that low). They should still retain a little bit of humidity and not turn to dust when you pick them up. I cut them up beforehand so that I can harvest the seeds (even though they’re the spiciest part), so that I can hopefully plant those later. No idea if they’re fertile. You need to dry the seeds too, but it’s much easier, just leave them spaced out on a plate for half a day.
Instead of fertilizer you can also use left over pasta water (without salt), or put some banana peels in a bucket of water for a few days and use that water or use coffee grounds. Lots of nutrition in it.
I’ve also heard you can use rice water if you let it ferment for a few days, but I tried that and the coffee grounds and it didn’t seem to do much, I was worried it was actually having an adverse effect.
People these days had their spine broken by capitalism. Beiig bad is is literally the first step to being good. When I started modding Halo CE I could only modify bitmaps. Now I can do transparent shaders and I am in the first phase of making a map.
I cut back on my social media usage massively last year. I’ve played guitar since 2018 but about 70% of my progression as a player has been done in the last 8 months or so. I’ve become more focused on writing and art as well as other interests that I have. I personally just viewed social media as a distraction if anything and I pretty much only use it to keep up with friends and to look for help/advice on whatever I’m working on at the moment.
Same, deleted Reddit, Twitter and TikTok off my phone and am now way more productive than I used to be
I feel the opposite way. Here I can get help for things. Good help, bad help, trolling help, all kinds. And some of it is useful. If you ask for encouragement, I’m sure a great many people would provide it.
I definitely think you are right. I consider myself a reasonably good cook for a home chef/hobbyist (I am maybe excessively beholden to traditional recipes, but it is what I like making), but I think if I hadn’t started when I was younger before social media blew up, I prboably wouldn’t be.
My first dishes were borderline inedible. My parent’s aren’t great at cooking so I was mostly self-taught, there was a LOT of trial and error involved. I would have probably thrown my pan out the window if I didn’t turn out a perfect omelette the first time I ever cracked an egg. On the other hand, some of the cooking shows that highlight bad chefs were kind of inspiring to me, because many times they showed those chefs turning their kitchens/recipes around and doing something great.
