Comment by abraxas
14 hours ago
The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.
Yeah, I'm not American and haven't been to Arizona. But from my understanding it can and regularly gets hellishly hot there, no?
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
I hate being outdoors 99.999% of the time, so much so that I will blanket declare "I hate the outdoors". Not just "the great outdoors" - I don't like sitting on a patio, in the shade, in what others call "perfect springtime weather". I'd rather be in a basement room with no windows.
The Mojave in the summertime at night (if and only if the sun is 100% behind the horizon) is really, properly, exquisite. My knowledge of its existence makes me irrationally angry whenever I have to be outdoors any other time/place, which is the aforementioned 99.999% of the time. The only other exception is the Sea of Crete, just before dawn or just after sunset, in May or September exclusively. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the overall lifelong experience of being forced to deal with Earth's atmosphere.
Arizona has cold. I used to visit a place where you could see ski lifts; although I was never there when they were operating.
I love hiking, but I always encourage people to start with short walks in nice places. You need a solid foundation of nice, normal, fun times before you start thinking about walking 17km a day through a freezing leech-infested mud pit, and more importantly you need time to work out what you actually enjoy.
I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
dust, hay fever, pollen, gnats, ugh!
What about like easy day hikes on 70 degree days?
Meh at best. Even in ideal conditions say, skiing in the Alps on a -5C sunny day feels like a bit of a chore. When I'm out there I sorta, kinda can convince myself that I like doing it but the chore of getting the gear packed, lining up for lift tickets, changing into the clumsy gear and all that other ceremony makes it on balance, not worth it. Same goes for all other outdoorsy stuff.