Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
I often go through a period of wondering how to use my time more productively. Since I have time and relatively little responsibilities (aside from keeping myself alive), I sometimes get the impulse that I must do more.
Such thoughts are often a trap. The idea that I need to be constantly working on something is in of itself a toxic cycle. I have to remember that my focus is on improving my health right now, not padding my CV.
I remember some years ago how everyone was saying we should all learn to code. Coding was some sort of golden ticket to wealth and fame. There were lauded stories of people like Steve Jobs who managed it. All you had to do was dedicate night and day and eventually you will find success.
I’m glad I never really bought into this mythology. I think I quickly realised that dedicating your life to something you didn’t enjoy was a pointless misery. The success stories were based upon people who did it out of passion, not out of some sort of cost-benefit analysis. As I’ve grown older,
Even then, it is extremely tough. For every success story there’s hundreds of others who we don’t hear about. I’ve also scrutinised the stories a bit more. Turns out, people like Steve Jobs had far more winding and oft random paths to success than people realise. Times have also changed, and the golden ticket in the end hasn’t turned out to be as golden as we thought. We’ve now come to the point where programmers are being displaced by AI, meaning mass lay offs and genuine hardships.
I admit that I often feel despair towards our modern day situation. Any skill I might dedicate myself towards is due mass upheaval. Although I continue my language classes, jobs in the sector are being eaten away by AI. Likewise, writing and editing work has imploded. Even blogs like this one are being subsumed into proxy wars of social media algorithms, not to mention competing with instantly generated AI slop.
By the end, I realise it’s better not to think about it too much. It’s better to just enjoy doing things. Yet enjoyment is sometimes harder to define than we might think. There’s more to pleasure than a pure pursuit of hedonism. It is actually rather unfulfilling to constantly do things on a whim.
Learning a language for example, is hard. It’s often not fun. Like any skill, it takes as much discipline as it does pleasure. Having structure and a teacher help frame it for me. Looking at how much time it will take to ‘master’ is demotivating, yet learning and seeing my progress has its own particular fulfillment.
Then, there is following the whims of pleasure. Doing what I feel like, depending on my mood. Right now, my ‘pleasure’ time is going to my PlayStation. On paper, this sounds like a frivolous activity that extends to pure escapism. But in practice, I end up finding games that are engrossing either through sufficient challenge or a strong narrative arc.
I’m currently replaying Elden Ring, which is as far away from frivolity and escapism as you can get. Combat is challenging. You will often die to the same boss multiple times. Meanwhile, the world is extremely oppressive and depressing. Completing cryptic quests often leads to the quest giver dying. It’s not for the faint of heart.
In the end, games like this are ones that people like me return to because it manages to keep sustained engagement. If it was too easy, I would have become bored and stopped playing it many hours ago.
Finding such a balance has also put me off reading for the last few months. It’s tricky to find books that feel a good intermediate level. I’m tired of reading personal development books. They can end up being quite generic and superficial, not to mention often very white-washed. Yet my 1000 page book on the history of India feels like self-imposed study. I think I’m better off finding something that has some level of substance, but doesn’t read like a text book. Such a combination isn’t necessarily easy to find, but no doubt exist within the millions of books out there.
When I started writing this article, I thought of engagement as three different categories. The intense: formal education through my language lesson. The mixed level: reading semi-educative books. Then the pleasurable: playing video games without a ‘goal’.
Yet as I’ve thought it through, I feel like the three are actually far more closer than I thought. In the end, most of my pleasures come down to having sufficient (but not too much) challenge and stimulation.
Maybe that is the key to enjoying anything consistently.