Your hobby can't just be drinking — it's the thing that eats all your hobbies.
I'm a serial hobbyist, and I always have been. Muay Thai. Boxing. Table tennis — I was a garage kid who'd hit for hours. Golf, to the point of mad science with launch monitors. RC cars, properly, to a Queensland title. Motorbikes, diving, surfing. And when the AI thing hit, it became a hobby too — the kind you fall down a hole into at 2am.
Here's what I worked out the hard way: drinking doesn't sit alongside your hobbies. It replaces them. One by one. The training slips because you're hungover. The paddle goes in the cupboard. The clubs get dusty. You tell yourself you're still that person, but the drink has quietly eaten every single thing you used to love.
So Step Two isn't a nice-to-have. It's load-bearing. Sobriety leaves a hole exactly the shape of every hour you used to spend drinking — and if you don't fill it with something you genuinely enjoy, the hole fills itself back up with the thing you just quit.
I picked the paddle up again, dead sober, and it was the first thing I'd properly enjoyed in a long time. That's the whole point of this rung: build a life that's actually fun without a drink in your hand, so being sober isn't a sacrifice — it's an upgrade.
This page is the hobbies, the gear, the aesthetic and the health side of it — the stuff that makes the climb worth climbing. A man with no hobbies but drinking isn't relaxed. He's just slowly disappearing.