The Best Analogue Hobbies for People Who Want to Slow Down
On succulents, repotting, and the strange joy of tending something that grows slower than you do.
By Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist
I have a small army of succulents and cacti at my home, and I check on them more often than I'd like to admit. Not because they need it — that's the whole point of a succulent, they barely need anything — but because I genuinely enjoy it. I'll notice a new offset pushing out from the base of an echeveria, or a cactus that's finally outgrown its pot, and something in me lights up in a way that's completely disproportionate to what's actually happening. A plant got slightly bigger. That's it. That's the whole event.
But the moment a succulent needs to be moved into a bigger pot is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite moments of my week. There's a certain sense of satisfaction in it that I can’t get enough of — gently loosening the roots, choosing the right size up, pressing new soil in around the base. It has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with attention. I'm not trying to get anywhere. I'm just noticing something grow, and helping it along.
I started with succulents and cacti specifically — not flowers, not a vegetable garden, this exact niche — because they reward patience in a way that almost nothing else in my life does. They grow slowly, year after year. They ask for very little. And every bit of change is the direct result of time passing and someone paying attention. There's no shortcut. You can't rush a cactus. You can only show up, watch, and occasionally repot.
It's become one of the clearest examples in my own life of something I write about constantly: the hobbies that ground us most aren't the ones that produce the most. They're the ones that ask us to be present for a process we can't speed up.
Why "Useless" Hobbies Aren't Useless
If you'd asked me years ago to justify spending twenty minutes deciding whether a haworthia needed more sun, I'm not sure I could have. It doesn't optimize anything. It doesn't go on a resume. By every metric we're trained to value, it's a waste of time.
And yet it's some of the most restorative time I spend all week — and it turns out there's real psychology behind why.
Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed what's known as Attention Restoration Theory back in the 1980s, built around a simple but important distinction: our attention comes in two forms. There's directed attention — the effortful, depleting kind we use at work, in traffic, scrolling a feed that's designed to keep grabbing us back. And there's involuntary attention — the effortless kind that gets pulled gently by something interesting without demanding anything of us. Watching a plant. Noticing the light change. Tracking the slow swell of a new leaf.
Directed attention is a finite resource. We spend it all day and it runs out, which is part of why we end most days feeling depleted in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness. Involuntary attention does the opposite — it replenishes the very resource the rest of our day drains. This is why a walk in a park restores you in a way that a walk through a mall doesn't, and why twenty minutes with your hands in soil can leave you feeling clearer than twenty minutes of trying to relax on your phone ever does.
There's a second piece of psychology at work too, from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow — the state we enter when a task is just challenging enough to hold our attention completely, without tipping into stress. Repotting a plant turns out to be a near-perfect flow activity: it requires just enough decision-making (how much room does this root system actually need?) to keep you present, without ever asking so much of you that you spiral into frustration. Your hands are busy. Your mind, for once, is not racing ahead to the next thing.
And there's something else succulents specifically have taught me, which is less about psychology and more about permission: not every form of growth is dramatic, and not every form of care needs to be either. A succulent doesn't reward you with a bloom every week. Most of the time, the growth is so slow you'd miss it if you weren't paying attention. In fact, if they bloom, it might be once per year or once in the entirety of their lifetime. That rarity makes the bloom that much more special. That's a useful thing to practice noticing, in a life that mostly trains us to expect immediate, visible results — and often constant rewards — from everything we do.
The Difference Between Resting and Restoring
It's worth pausing on something that confused me for a long time: why a hobby that takes effort — soil under your nails, a recipe that takes all day, a needle you keep losing the thread of — leaves you feeling more rested than an hour of scrolling that asks nothing of you at all.
Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory offers a useful answer. Their research identifies three psychological needs that have to be met for an activity to actually feel satisfying, rather than just occupying: autonomy (you're choosing this, not being pulled into it), competence (you're getting better at something, even slightly), and relatedness (it connects you to something — a person, a tradition, a living thing you're responsible for).
Scrolling fails all three. You didn't choose the next video, an algorithm did. You're not getting better at anything. And whatever connection it simulates dissolves the moment you put the phone down. It feels like rest in the moment and like depletion an hour later — which is exactly backwards from what real rest should do.
A succulent that needs repotting hits all three needs at once. You decided to check on it. You're slowly, almost without noticing, becoming someone who knows what an overcrowded root system looks like. And you're tending something alive, which creates a small but real sense of relatedness even if the "someone" on the other end of it is a prickly cactus. That combination is most of why it restores you in a way passive rest never quite manages to do.
This is also, I think, the real distinction between a hobby and a distraction. A distraction asks nothing of you and gives nothing back. A hobby — even a small, slow, slightly ridiculous one like obsessively checking whether your echeveria has outgrown its pot — asks just enough to make the giving-back possible.
Analogue Hobbies Worth Trying (Beyond Succulents)
Succulents are my hyper-fixation, but the underlying principle — slow, tactile, process-over-output — shows up in a long list of analogue hobbies. If gardening isn't your thing, here are a few worth considering, all chosen for the same reason: they ask for your attention, not your output.
Cut flower gardening. A different register than succulents — faster, showier, more forgiving of a heavier hand — but it scratches the same itch: tending something living on its own timeline. There's great satisfaction to be had in growing something specifically to cut and bring inside, rather than buying it already finished.
Film photography. The opposite of a camera roll you never look at. You have a finite number of frames, no preview screen, and a real gap between taking the photo and seeing it — which forces a depth of attention digital photography has honestly trained out of most of us.
Bread baking. Most of the actual "work" of bread is waiting. Learning to be comfortable with that — to let dough do something slowly, on its own schedule, without intervening — is its own small practice in patience.
Hand embroidery or needlework. Repetitive, meditative, and almost impossible to rush. The kind of hobby where your hands are occupied enough to let your mind actually settle instead of spiral.
Jigsaw puzzles. Genuinely underrated as an adult hobby. No screen, no urgency, and a built-in flow state — just enough challenge to hold your focus without asking anything stressful of you.
A correspondence practice. This is the one closest to my own work, and it follows the exact same logic as everything above. Writing a letter or a postcard by hand has no shortcut — you can't speed up handwriting the way you can speed up typing, and that's precisely why it works. It forces slowness in a way that a text message never will, and it leaves something physical behind that a text never can.
Starting Small Is the Whole Point
If you're looking at this list and feeling the pull to pick one and commit to it fully, I'd gently push back on that instinct. The succulents didn't start as a fully formed hobby with the right pots and the right soil mix and a windowsill arranged just so. It started with one plant I almost forgot to water, that somehow survived anyway, and a slowly growing curiosity about what it actually needed.
That's a better entry point than trying to build the perfect version of a hobby from day one. Buy one small succulent. Pick up a single roll of film. Start one bread recipe and let it take all day. The goal isn't to become someone with an elaborate analogue hobby — it's to give yourself one small, regular moment where your attention isn't being pulled by anything that wants something from you.
I'd also say: don't pick based on what looks best. I didn't choose succulents because they photograph well or because there's a particularly compelling aesthetic around cacti gardening (though there is one, if you go looking for it). I chose them because the first one I owned happened to survive my neglecting it, and that small, accidental success made me curious enough to get a second one, and then a third. The hobby built itself out of attention I was already giving it, not out of a plan I sat down and made.
That's worth remembering if you try one of these and it doesn't immediately click. A jigsaw puzzle that bores you after twenty minutes isn't proof that slow hobbies aren't for you — it might just mean puzzles aren't your particular form of slow. The point isn't the specific activity. It's finding the one that happens to hold your attention without asking you to perform, produce, or finish on anyone else's schedule. For some people that's bread. For some it's a roll of film they won't see the results of for a week. For me, it's a porch full of plants that grow so slowly I sometimes forget to notice — until, suddenly, one of them very clearly needs a bigger pot, and I get to spend twenty completely unproductive, completely restorative minutes giving it one.
My days are punctuated by these small moments — checking on cacti that are, by any objective measure, doing almost nothing. And somehow, that's exactly the point.
If a correspondence practice is the analogue hobby that calls to you, The Postcard Société was built for exactly this — a quarterly box with everything you need to start, no decision-making required. Learn more here.
Dr. Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the founder of The Postcard Société and the publisher of Psychologie, a publication on travel psychology, analogue life, and the art of moving through the world with intention. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.