askchapo

It’s gonna sound lame but get a 90s copy of the boy scout handbook and learn all the stuff in it by putting yourself in situations where you will use them. For things like tourniquets and other first aid, take a class. Don’t be afraid to update the methods by looking up stuff online.

If you’re not sure why I suggested this: bsa operated at one point as a pipeline into the military for children. The skillset it teaches is basically hobby infantry.

Lockpicking is fun and has helped me out a few times when I lost keys. There's some cool clear locks you can get to help you understand how basic locks work.

Electronics and soldering are fun and useful, allowing you to repair and repurpose devices.

Amateur Radio is cool as hell, you can talk to people around your area or thousands of miles away, it dovetails nicely with electronics and soldering. One way to reduce cost of this hobby is making your own antennas etc. But you can get on the air in the US for $60, 35 for the license, a free exam, and 25 for a Baofeng GT-5R, which is FCC compliant and I've gotten good repeater contact at nearly 10 miles.

Programming is useful and basically free if you have access to a computer.

Physical activity of any kind is excellent, especially if you can combine it with one of the above listed activities. Radio lends itself to this with POTA and SOTA.

An old school communist comrade of mine swears by geocaching

Getting into fermentation could be interesting. There's the fun aspect like making beer or wine but there's also foods like kimchi or sauerkraut or cheese. It's good to know how to do and could be helpful at preserving food in the near future where it might be necessary.

Hiking is a gateway to a lot of different useful skills and knowledge bases. It's good exercise for your core and legs which makes you embrace stress/pain productively. Revolution is mostly cardio and it's good cardio too. You learn your native ecosystems, all of the different components of them, and how society is built on top of them. Ethnobotany is as much a survival skill and poverty food enhancer as it is a really rich field of indigenous studies. I'm much better at intuitively reading the weather, land navigation, climbing, and general bushcraft skills after doing it. Being able to make a solid socioecological critique instead of just a socioeconomic one connects with people who align with us in important values but don't know how to connect the dots between economy and environment. The more time you spend hiking the more you learn the metabolic value of each individual species/land feature that becomes background noise in our alienation from nature.

shooting

Not necessarily direct praxis but any kind of hand repair skill seems like just fundamentally good to learn and also a fun hobby, like hand sewing.

I mean the classic is learn to quadcopter

lockpicking semi useful, especially techniques like raking and stuff I suppose, but not as useful as being able to cut or drill locks I'd think. bolt cutters and angle grinders can get you far. Though those don't exactly require much skill

I got into lockpicking 6 months ago and its fun as hell, led me down a rabbit hole where i now want a flipper zero but i cant afford one