Want New Friends? Find a Hobby
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In these days of high stress, financial and otherwise, we all have our favorite ways of enjoying ourselves. We all have our favorite hobbies. For some of us it’s watching T.V. - sports, entertainment shows, reality shows, and so on. And for others, it’s doing some sort of activity such as novel writing software, photography, running, or even bird watching.
One thing that makes just about all hobbies more enjoyable is sharing them with another person. For example, even a solitary activity such as running, is more enjoyable when doing it with a friend. And some hobbies, such as tennis, pretty much require that two or more people be involved.
Sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, finding a friend who enjoyed the same things you did was simple, because everyone in a community grew up together. But we have gradually moved away from each other. Childhood friends now live on different coasts. Family members often only get together on holidays because everyone lives so far from each other.
Everything together makes getting those who love the same hobbies harder to put together.
But then the Internet came along. And, conversely from keeping people apart from each other, as many social observers once feared, the Internet has instead become a great resource to bring persons of similar interests together. Over the past eight or so years, literally thousands of discussion groups have sprung up all over the Internet, begun by people with an interest or hobby that they loved and showing their participants steps to writing a book. Somewhere in the course of starting their discussion group, most of them discovered that they were not alone in their love of their hobby.
And in many cases, for many people, the common online interest has continued into the real world and created genuine off-line friendships. Friendships that in the good old days never would have happened.
This, more than many things, goes to show just how much of a communal animal that man truly is and how much we all need each other to make life worth living.
Chris Edwards is webmaster and writer for author related subjects such as writing children book.
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