How we cope: Svidomi's guilty pleasures that help us relax
Svidomi
Life doesn't seem that fun as an adult: you have to pay the rent and utility bills, go to work every day, and have only a few hours to relax. When you add war to this situation, you can forget about rest, even mental rest.
That's when some things come to the rescue to make life comfortable for a moment. Some of them can be considered guilty pleasures. We'll be honest with you — we have them too!
When I feel like it's getting hard, I go back to my hometown to lie in the sun, cuddle with the cats, and ride my bike. I also like to watch anime.
On bad days, I like to go to bookstores, look at beautiful book covers, open them, read the synopsis and the first page, take pictures of the ones I like, and then end up not buying them. But my main guilty pleasure is listening to Pitbull songs.
I buy a lot of books, but in my defence, I read them all. When I'm having bad thoughts, I watch Good Omens, Reign, Harry Potter, and Howl's Moving Castle. I also like to collect postcards: from different cities, countries, old and new. I do scrapbooking too — it helps me to preserve cool moments from my life.
My guilty pleasure is consuming a lot of video content. From videos of bottles breaking on TikTok to two-hour long interviews with various people.
I like to go to bookstores and smell books but not buy them.
When I need to clear my head, I watch rom-coms.
To distract myself from work and take a break, I bake bread. I also like to research genealogy.
I have a lot of things that help me stay sane: dancing at 2 am to the song Bulterier by Skriabin or listening to Ukrainian pop music from the 60s and 70s. I also love rewatching all the seasons of Friends. My friends and I also have a groupchat where we send photos of our food. And most importantly: imagining the Crimean Bridge collapsing and Russia falling apart.
I don't take information well by ear, so to distract myself from editing texts, I watch the same films a million times. Among the films that are comforting for me are Harry Potter, Twilight, 13 Going on 30, How to Be Single, and Stranger Things
