Self-Reliance · Avocations · Morale & Resilience
Not every avocation connects to a preparedness domain. Some connect to the person who does all the preparedness work — and that connection is not incidental.
This section covers creative, social, and observational avocations whose value during disruption is harder to quantify than a food supply or a communications plan — but which the evidence, and the history, suggest are equally real.
Explore this territoryWhy this territory exists
During the Great Depression, the federal government funded artists, musicians, theater companies, and writers — not only as a jobs program, but because policymakers understood that cultural activity was part of community survival. The WPA Arts Projects produced murals, plays, music, and writing that helped communities maintain a sense of shared life during years of severe disruption. This was not a luxury. It was recognized social infrastructure.
During World War II, the British government funded the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts specifically to bring theater, concerts, and art exhibitions to bombed and evacuated communities. Military planners and public health officials both understood that maintaining cultural activity was part of maintaining civilian capacity to endure the war. The performers who traveled to factory towns and shelters and rural communities were doing work that mattered to the war effort — not indirectly, but directly.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, before any official encouragement, people instinctively reached for making and absorbing activities — bread baking, knitting, puzzle-solving, reading, drawing — at historically unusual rates. This wasn't escapism. It was a well-documented human response to the specific stress of extended disruption: the need for absorbing, purposeful activity that restores a sense of agency and continuity.
What the research shows
Absorbing activities interrupt rumination
Psychological research on creative and absorbing activities documents what practitioners have always known: the state of absorbed attention — what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow" — interrupts the rumination cycles that characterize anxiety and stress. Reading deeply, drawing, working a puzzle, playing an absorbing game — these don't resolve the source of stress, but they restore the cognitive capacity to manage it.
Social creative activity maintains community bonds
Community mental health research after major disasters — Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, COVID-19 — consistently identifies maintained social connection and shared meaningful activity as among the strongest protective factors for long-term community mental health.1 The quilting circle that kept meeting. The book group that continued. The neighborhood game night that persisted. These were not trivial.
Children need play as a genuine need
UNICEF and child development researchers identify the maintenance of play — specifically unstructured, child-directed play — as a critical component of children's wellbeing during and after disasters. Play allows children to process experiences, maintain developmental continuity, and signal their distress in ways that adults can respond to. A game or a craft project in the go-bag is not an indulgence; for children, it is a health supply.
1 SAMHSA. "Disaster Technical Assistance Center: Recovery Support." SAMHSA.gov/dtac — documents social connection and meaningful activity as protective factors in disaster mental health outcomes.
Four areas of practice
These avocations are valuable because they are absorbing, satisfying, and connecting — not because they have preparedness applications. That they also sustain morale and social cohesion during hard times is a consequence of what they are, not an argument for taking them up.
Creative Work During Hard Times
Drawing · Painting · Music · Writing
The solitary creative practices — the ones done at a kitchen table late at night, in a sketchbook on a break, in a journal after the day is done. Drawing and painting train observation and attention. Writing externalizes experience and gives it form. Music performs something that language can't. These practices have been part of human life in the most difficult of circumstances — not in spite of those circumstances, but sometimes because of them.
Absorbing attention; interrupts rumination
Portable — most forms require minimal supplies
Sustains the sense of individual agency
Some forms double as community expression
Crafts and Community
Knitting · Quilting · Pottery · Fiber Arts
The making practices that are most often done in company — around a table, in a circle, with others working on their own projects alongside. Quilting bees, knitting circles, and pottery communities have historically been among the most durable social institutions in American communities, because they combine productive making with talk and presence. The object is almost secondary. What's being made is the social fabric.
Inherently social; supports connection
Produces tangible useful objects
Intergenerational knowledge transmission
Portable for knitting, crochet, hand sewing
Reading and Stories
Books · Storytelling · Reading Groups
Narrative is one of the primary human tools for making sense of experience — and in periods of disruption, that need for sense-making becomes acute. Reading is not escape from difficulty; it is a form of engagement with the world at a remove, where things that cannot be resolved in life can be resolved in a story. Book groups add the social dimension — the collective meaning-making of people trying to understand the same text together. Stories told aloud are the oldest version of the practice, requiring nothing at all.
Deeply portable — a book requires nothing else
Absorbing; develops the capacity to be alone
Group reading is inherently social
Storytelling requires nothing physical at all
Play and Games
Board Games · Cards · Puzzles
Play is not a reward for finishing the serious work. It is the serious work, for children, and remains a genuine human need for adults. In evacuation centers and temporary housing after major disasters, the presence of games and play materials is among the first things documented by relief workers as improving the atmosphere — not because it distracts from difficulty, but because it restores the experience of ordinary social life. A deck of cards weighs nothing. A good game creates its own world.
Essential for children — a health supply
Highly portable — cards, dice, compact games
Inherently social; requires no electricity
Puzzles and solo games for solitary time
What history shows
During the Blitz, amateur theatrical groups performed in bomb shelters. Choirs and musical groups formed in internment camps. Prison libraries are among the most actively used rooms in correctional facilities. During the long COVID lockdowns of 2020–21, libraries reported dramatic increases in book borrowing and reading groups multiplied online.
These are not coincidences. They are the consistent human response to extended disruption: a reach for the activities that provide meaning, absorption, and social connection when the ordinary sources of those things are unavailable. Rebecca Solnit documented this pattern across disasters in A Paradise Built in Hell — the striking community creativity that emerges precisely in the space that catastrophe opens, when normal life stops and people discover what they value most.
The practical implication is not that everyone should stockpile art supplies and game sets. It's that having some of these practices already established — genuinely practiced, genuinely enjoyed — means having access to them when circumstances make them most valuable. The gardener who gardens for pleasure has seeds saved. The reader who reads for pleasure has books on the shelf. The knitter who knits for pleasure has a project in a bag by the door.
What travels well — the portable practice kit
The practices most at risk during displacement are those requiring equipment or infrastructure — a kiln, a piano, a studio. The practices that travel are the ones with small physical footprints. A small creative and social kit alongside the household go-bag adds almost nothing in weight or cost.
Journal and pen
The most portable creative practice available. Serves as logbook, emotional processing, observational drawing ground, writing space. One composition notebook and two pens. Weighs almost nothing. Has been the companion of people in displacement for as long as paper existed.
One or two physical books
Not an e-reader (battery-dependent) but physical books — including at least one rereadable for adults and one familiar, comforting book for each child. Physical books work in the dark with a flashlight and in the absence of any electricity. Children's books especially: a familiar story read aloud at bedtime is continuity of routine when physical surroundings have changed entirely.
A deck of cards and a compact game
A standard deck of playing cards enables dozens of games for any number of players, all ages. A compact strategy game (Hive, Blink, Uno, Dominoes) adds variety. For households with children: a small familiar game provides routine and social play when the familiar environment is gone. Total weight: under half a pound. Total cost: under $20.
A portable craft project in progress
Knitting, crochet, hand embroidery, and cross-stitch all travel in a small bag. A project already underway is more accessible during disruption than starting something new — familiar patterns, established rhythm. For people who knit or crochet: the project is already in a bag by the door. It just needs to go in the car.
When to seek professional support
The morale and resilience territory in this section covers sustaining practices — the activities that maintain psychological equilibrium during disruption. When things are seriously difficult — grief, trauma, psychological crisis — the resource is the therapeutic and clinical support at Recovery: Emotional, and the crisis resources at Mental Health During Disruptions. This section is about sustaining practices, not therapeutic ones.
Related guides across the site
Sewing & Mending
Where the social craft tradition overlaps with practical textile skills — quilting bees and sewing circles are both on this side of the line.
All Avocations
The bridge pages for gardening, foraging, fermentation, radio, woodworking, and more — the domain-connected practices.
Recovery: Emotional
Therapeutic support, grief processing, and clinical resources — for when sustaining practices aren't enough.
Community Resilience
The social infrastructure that makes cultural activity possible — knowing your neighbors, organizing around shared practice.
"In the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe, it appears that the possibilities of human nature are illuminated, and what shines out is not the worst but the best."
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell
The activities in this section are part of what that best looks like — and they're worth practicing in ordinary times so they're available in the others.