You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn.

In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay dividends for life as these skills never really go away. There are even social aspects, as you’ll quite literally become a more interesting person to talk to.

It requires some time, usually up to an hour a day. That’s genuinely too much for some people, and if you work 80 hour weeks and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos, then you may want to put this ambition aside for now and deal with that instead. If on the other hand you spend any amount of time each day scrolling your phone while Netflix plays something you’re half-watching on a screen across the room, you do have time!

There’s many (bordering on too many) learning resources out there for almost anything, on youtube, on reddit, on wikis, in books. You’ll want to avoid overloading on information when starting out, just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel and go from there, at your own pace.

Many adults haven’t done this in a while, and many haven’t ever done self-directed study, so it’s time for some expectation management:

While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this.

Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.

Practice is when you gather data for the brain to process overnight. Sleep is when improvements happen. You should go in with this expectation. During the practice sessions you’ll either see no improvements or a slow degradation.

Your improvements will plateau after a while, and you will have climbed Mt. Awful and arrived on the long logarithmic plateau of being a mediocre intermediate. At this point you’ll be good enough to actually have some practical use of your skills, so from here on it’s easier to pick up incidental practice and progress without having to grind. How to climb past this stage is beyond the scope of this article, most people honestly never even make it this far.

How long to practice each day varies with the task, but usually something like 30-45 minutes unless the thing requires a lot of long breaks, then longer. Practicing longer than that just makes you tired and sloppy and then you’ll ingrain all the mistakes you make. Stopping when you start making a lot of mistakes is a good cue.

What practice looks like is a lot dependent on the skill, if you picked 3D modelling you may be following along with some video tutorial in Blender, and if you picked touch typing maybe you’re grinding away at keybr. You’ll want to pace yourself, daily deliberate practice is what makes you better. Focus on the basics when you’re a beginner, if applicable, practicing stuff you aren’t ready for isn’t helpful, neither is mainlining reddit threads about really advanced topics. Learning something new is a long journey, and you really don’t get there quicker by rushing advanced concepts.

Learning anything is a long term project, and long term projects are necessary for building a sense of control over your circumstances. Almost nothing can be deliberately and meaningfully changed within the scope of a day, but in months, certainly years, a lot of things can be made to happen.