When did everything you enjoy have to be useful?
- You draw well? Sell your art.
- You love cooking? Start a business.
- You exercise? Track every number.
- You read? Analyze what you learned.
Somehow simply enjoying something stopped feeling like enough. Even rest became something we had to justify: a walk needs a certain amount of steps, a hobby needs progress, and doing absolutely nothing now just feels like wasting time.
Maybe that's why so many things stop being fun. The moment something makes us happy we start measuring it, improving it, posting it, comparing it, trying to be good at it.
Think about being a child: you drew terrible pictures, ran around for no reason, made things nobody would buy, played games you never put on a resume, and somehow you never asked if it was being productive.
But some things should be able to exist without taking you anywhere. A song can just sound beautiful. A hobby can remain a hobby. You can accomplish nothing impressive and it’d still be a good day. You can do something badly and still love doing it. Your entire existence does not need to become a project you are constantly optimizing.
There should still be pieces of you that the world cannot grade, measure, or monetize. Keep something in your life that has absolutely no purpose other than making you glad you are here, because not everything meaningful needs to be useful.