Very nice post. I wish life didn't ruin this for me. As a child, I was forced to pick berries and mushrooms alone when all my friends were playing football - and it made me hate the process with all my heart. But that was so long ago - maybe I should give it one more chance...
Seattle has wild (foreign, invasive) blackberries all over the place, and in Summer you can easily drive around a bit, spot them, and then spend twenty minutes picking and eating them. As someone from southern California, it's a marvelous thing for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking.
I get it, same reason I enjoy gardening alone in general.
Most of us spend our work time balancing 100 different things, putting out fires, bouncing between meetings, answering adhoc pings via calls/zooms/slacks, and struggling to do the deep work we are allegedly paid for in between.
There's a therapeutic aspect to certain kinds of physical hobby/chore work or full focussed hobbyist time that counterbalances this.
Otherwise at the end of a day of being burned out, we ruminate & doom scroll which only makes things worse.
I'm currently on a week-long vacation and it's been so long since I had some proper time off that I forgot how slowly time flows when you're not under pressure.
I do long distance solo road cycling. The riding takes just enough of my cognitive capacity that the rest of my mind wanders lightly, usually not thinking about anything of substance. It feels like meditation to me.
Most of us spend our work time balancing 100 different things, putting out fires, bouncing between meetings, answering adhoc pings via calls/zooms/slacks, and struggling to do the deep work we are allegedly paid for in between.
There's a therapeutic aspect to certain kinds of physical hobby/chore work or full focussed hobbyist time that counterbalances this.
Otherwise at the end of a day of being burned out, we ruminate & doom scroll which only makes things worse.
Life seems a bit better after a long walk preferably somewhere nice