Therapy and house improvements first, making my home livable and pleasant. Exercise. Looking after my health.

I have severe chronic pain, when it’s bad I’m housebound, when it’s good I’m lucky to go out at all. Prior to this happening to me, I was a gigging musician, going to culinary school as well. Spent a large portion of my time since it all started avoiding cooking and music altogether, both of which I’m now occasionally able to enjoy in moderation. I also picked up programming, Linux computing and microcontroller projects, 3d printing, modeling for both animation and CAD, some creative writing, kombucha brewing, even been recording some of my music lately.

I’d be playing and running a lot more D&D. I’d go outside more. I’d drive less. I’d spend more time with friends, my family’s kind of awful, and my siblings and I don’t talk much with them as it is. If money weren’t an issue in this hypothetical, I’d travel a little more than I do. Maybe go to the beach more often than one weekend every five years. Maybe go see other countries.

I think long term I’d get into writing, or game dev. I’m trying not to let my job keep me from doing that now, but with the effort I’ve put in and the hours I work, I’ve been in a quasi-permanent state of burnout for the last ten years or so. I spend a lot of time feeling like a zombie, and even when I have some downtime, I find it hard to remember who I am and what I like. Even minimal amounts of effort inside or outside of work overwhelm me at this point. I’m not going to kill myself or wish that I get hit by a bus, but I really don’t enjoy the prospect of living through another 20-40 years of this shit, and I don’t think there’s any significant change that I can effect that will keep me from having to work until I die.

Projects! So many projects!

I’m not a hypothetical after a broken neck/back 2/26/14.

Learned hobby electronics/KiCAD/etching PCBs, 3D CAD design, 3D printing, reading sci-fi, learning programming and going through computer science lectures, and adopting Linux is how I’ve spent most of the last 9 years.

Learning CAM, kernel hacking, and getting more into amateur radio are on my bucket list.

I’m in the middle of taking a year off of work to answer this exact question. My answer turned out to be:

-Spend a month driving my Jeep around the northwest US, camping my way through National Forests and BLM land

-Buying a sailboat on the Puget Sound and spending a few months fitting it out with modern electronics and Starlink internet

-Sailing from abandoned island to abandoned island, stopping to explore the historic downtown waterfront district of some random town every week or so

(Posted from 30 yards off the shore of Hope Island Marine State Park near Olympia, WA)

I would sew costumes, clothes, and stuffed animals!

I would also give away stuffed animals to people in my town. It’d be fun to hide them around different areas to be discovered, with a note encouraging people who want them to take them home.

• Helping authors to make Ebooks that aren’t hot DRM-filled garbage (Standard Ebooks FTW!), particularly for TTRPGs which often only get PDFs electronically. Generally war against the prevalence of PDFs for electronic viewing.
• Help research permaculture, essentially the study of why wild flora gets along on it’s own while crops always need to be tended and are generally fussy. Of course I’d do this by reverting the area around my house back to it’s natural state, just with more edible stuff around, ideally.
• Work much harder on my own TTRPG sourcebook ideas
• Consider legitimately contributing to open-source projects, even though I hate corporate software development
• Wander a whole lot, play some vidjya games, meditate more.

I’d be able to commit real, serious time towards my open-source projects. Maybe I’d finally get my fediverse app off the ground? I’d also take up art and gardening for some variety.