Exactly. I’m not a psychologist or biologist but from what I read, while we are alive, our bodies tend towards homeostasis, a chemically balanced state. Simply, you cannot be in a high-dopamine “happy” state all the time without going back to a neutral or down state afterwards. Even without drugs, highs are usually followed by lows. Not trying to be happy at all times but accepting that sometimes, there are hardships, will help you having a fullfilled and content life.

Anyway, that homeostasis does not mean that everyone is equally happy/unhappy on average. On the one side there are people with depression and on the other side people whose lives have many happy moments. What helps for me is connecting with friends and family, going into nature and seeing animals, doing exercise and having off-screen time, mindfullness and generally having some work-life balance. Which I admit not everyone can afford and I am privileged to have. Doing or having those things helps me having a happier and more fullfilled life, but sometimes life still sucks, there is no happy-all-the-time.

Definitely the opposite of “light”, but you mentioned chess and if you’re into something similar but very different, you might try learning #Go together on online-go.com. That site has a very short introduction into the game under the Learn tab, but it only covers the very basics and initially you will have no idea what you’re doing. The rules are simple, but there is a lot of complexity that arises from that and professionals study the game for years. But even as a complete beginner it’s fun. Full on 19x19 games can take a long time, but games on a 9x9 board are fairly quick, comparable to a chess game.

Still, this would be a journey. If you want something not turn-based and relaxing to play while chatting maybe try something else but I can’t give any recommendations.

Kbin and Lemmy are both different pieces of software that can be used to spin up an instance of a reddit-like news aggregator. Both speak the ActivityPub protocol, a common “language” that allows instances in the Fediverse to connect. In theory a Lemmy or KBin instance can connect to all other Fediverse instances via ActivityPub, no matter whether the server runs on the Lemmy or KBin Software or it’s an instance of Mastodon or Pleroma. But the administrators of a particular instance can restrict which servers they want to federate with, but that is not a feature of the used software. A caveat is, that in practice there had been some issues with federation between Lemmy and Kbin servers in the past, at least I heard so. You could regard this as software bugs and in current versions that should be better.

Also a reason that many people choose KBin over Lemmy is that supposedly, the original Lemmy developer has some far-left “tankie” world-views and runs the “lemmygrad” instance. Many instances defederate with that (and maybe other Lemmy instances), but those are social aspects, and not an issue with the Lemmy software itself.

I only need three touches, using the MessageEase English with Symbols layout ln thumb key. That layout shows the single quote on the alpabetical “front” layer, while it is hidden behind a symbol layer in the default layout. Tou can find the layout list in the settings.

Thumb-Key is aiming to be an FOSS replacement to the now unmaintained MessageEase. Like MessageEase, it offers a 3x3 touch-and-swipe layout. Such a layout takes some time to learn, but allows to type fast and accurately, thus getting rid of the dependence on prediction/auto-correction, without which QWERTY on small touchscreens would be unusable. Some people report being able to type > 50 WPM on MessageEase and the same should be possible with Thumb-Key. It’s a young project and is still missing many features and gestures of MessageEase, but it is active and has a community here at thumbkey@lemmy.ml.

I only recently switched from GBoard to MessageEase and ThumbKey, and I still around 25 WPM, but I found that I stopped making mistakes when typing out the long master password for my password manage on my phone, because this is one of the areas where auto-correct couldn’t help.

But I am still far away from reaching the speeds of swiping on a QWERTY-keyboard without word prediction. So if you don’t mind that and don’t want to spend your free time learning alternative layouts, stick to QWERTY layouts, but if you want a keyboard layout to type exactly what you want, try one of these 3x3 boards. To be honest, if you want to give it a shot, out of the two I wound probably still recommend MessageEase, as Thumb-Key is very alpha, but that might change. I have both with the same layout and switch back and forth.