So I’ve fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole again. Shrimp keeping. Fish keeping. Aquascaped tanks I’ll never build. Planted nano setups with little neocaridina shrimp picking around the moss.
I had fish and shrimp for years, with the joy and the loss that come with keeping anything alive. Eventually it all came down.
Now I’m sitting here thinking about getting back into it. And the more I sit with that thought, the more I realize I’m not really thinking about shrimp. I’m doing the same quiet math I do with every hobby and every pet:
What can my body actually sustain?
Why the tanks came down
I started the hobby with a 36 gallon tank. It didn’t take long for that to feel like too much. So I downgraded to a Fluval Flex 15 gallon in the living room, then later added a Fluval Flex 9 gallon on my desk in the bedroom.
The 9 gallon happened because of a betta. One of those poor fish living in a lonely little cup at a big box pet store. You’ve seen them. Stacked on shelves in maybe an inch of water, sometimes for weeks. A whole nine gallon planted tank felt like the bare minimum I could offer.
The 9 gallon lasted a couple of years, until enough shrimp and fish had died in too short a stretch that it felt like the right time to let the tank go too. The 15 gallon hung on a few more years before the urge to rearrange and downsize finally pushed me out of the hobby altogether.
Fish tank maintenance is hard work. Even more so when you have mobility challenges.
You’re hauling water in and out. Reaching down into the tank to scrub algae. Wrestling a gravel vacuum into corners you can barely see. Lugging buckets that are either too heavy on the way out or sloshing everywhere on the way back in.
None of that is a one-time thing. It’s every week or two, forever, as long as the tank is running.
I loved having the tanks. I loved watching everyone in them.
But the cleaning slowly became something I dreaded. And a hobby you dread isn’t really a hobby anymore.
Why shrimp keep pulling me back
Shrimp tanks, especially small planted ones, are a different animal. They’re forgiving in ways fish tanks aren’t.
A well-cycled, heavily planted nano tank with shrimp basically runs itself. Light feeding. Small water changes. The plants do a lot of the heavy lifting for water quality. The shrimp themselves are tiny cleanup crews.
It’s the same hobby in spirit: the watching, the planning, the gentle obsession with water parameters. But with a fraction of the physical demand.
That matters. A lot.
The quiet pet math
It’s worth pausing here to say what I actually mean by “the math.”
If you’ve heard of Spoon Theory, you already get it. Coined by Christine Miserandino in 2003, the shorthand is this: disabled and chronically ill people start each day with a limited number of spoons. Each spoon is a unit of energy. Every task costs spoons.
Showering. Cooking. An appointment. A conversation. Cleaning a fish tank.
All of it draws from the same pile. When you’re out, you’re out. And borrowing against tomorrow has a cost.
The math is figuring out which spoons go where.
That’s what I’m doing when I think about a shrimp tank versus a fish tank. It’s what I’m doing constantly, with everything else too.
Disabled people do this math all the time. Not just with hobbies. With pets too.
Surley is my service dog. He earns his keep, and he saves me spoons. Every task he does for me is a task I’d otherwise spend my own energy on. If he weren’t a working dog, I honestly don’t think I would have a dog at all. Dogs are physical. Walking. Picking up after them. Bath time. All of it costs spoons.
The cat is easier, mostly because Jason handles the day-to-day. Feeding, cleanup, all of it. I handle the vet appointments. And when Jason’s out of town, the rest is on me too. Most days though, the cat doesn’t draw much from my pile.
And shrimp? Different math entirely.
Every fish tank I had cost spoons no matter the size. The 36 took more than the 15. The 15 took more than the 9. But all of them took, week after week, forever.
A planted shrimp tank would still cost spoons up front. Cycling. Planting. Getting the water dialed in. That’s real work.
But once it’s established, the ongoing cost drops in a way a fish tank’s never did. Top off some water. Drop in a piece of food. Watch them be weird little aliens.
That’s not laziness. That’s a real consideration.
What I’m sitting with
I haven’t decided anything yet. The tanks aren’t back up. The shrimp aren’t ordered.
But I think a small planted shrimp tank might happen. Something low. Something I can reach into without contorting. Something that’s mostly self-sustaining and mostly there for the joy of watching it.
That feels like the right kind of hobby for where my body is right now. Not the version of fish keeping I had before. A version that fits.
I’ve done this kind of right-sizing before, after all. 36 gallons to 15 to 9 to nothing. A small shrimp tank would just be the next step in the same direction.
I think a lot of disabled people end up doing this same kind of right-sizing with the things we love. Not giving them up, but reshaping them. Finding the version we can actually sustain.
That’s not settling. That’s smart.
If you have a hobby or pet, have you done this kind of right-sizing too? I’d love to hear what that looked like for you.
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