for as long as I can remember, ever since I started my working life (and maybe even longer before, during my academic career), I’ve always focused more on completing the task at hand.
Every single day of my life, there’s chores. Work. Things I have to do to have have a productive day. Things that I have to do before I am allowed to feel happy. These tasks are usually called chores, work for a simple reason: They are fundamentally not fun, engaging, meaningful to do. They are the sort of tasks you do for “survival”. My brain clocked it as such. There was no insight to be found, there was no life lessons to be learned, and the world is full of them.
The worst ones are the unpredictable ones. The ones you have no idea if it’s going to take one hour or three days. They seep into your free time so easily. I find myself more than often in the beginning of my career to work late into the night on a friday, sometimes on the weekend. I still do them sometimes.
It’s hard to separate your job from your life. Especially in analysis or thinking work. You will carry the problem you are trying to solve all the way to your vacation half way around the world. The body may rest but the mind remembers.
You’re supposed to get some sort of feeling of achievement when you complete a big task. And you do, just not as much as you think. And if the big ones don’t make you all that satisfied, nevermind the small ones. They keep you feeling productive just enough that you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time. And yet you kind of do.
All theses tasks, especially work tasks, feel so disconnected from the real world and consequences for most people. You have no sense of helping the community, or reaping the rewards for your hard work, or that something has changed as a result of your work. Perhaps the most extreme cases are the bullshit jobs that I think people have known to exist for years, and yet only recently been given the vulgar name.
These tasks might be productive, they might keep me my job, they might provide valuable skills to me, there’s all kinds of justifications on why “Hey, it’s not all that bad!” or that this is a prime example of a “first world problem”. I’m aware that I’m not the first one and certainly not the last one in these chains of people complaining about working since the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800s, but they really don’t bring me any sort of lasting happiness or satisfaction upon completion.
They feel more like daily tasks you do on a gacha game. Designed to keep you playing just long enough and engaged. And if you want a bigger prize, you gotta pay more (money and attention).
Anyway, this rant is sort of meta because in writing this mini essay-rant I am trying to apply the antidote to this “illness” in my life in 2025 as a 21st century man. I’m trying to become more intentional and become more creative in my personal life. Writing, making music and all sorts of activities an projects a person might do.
In addition, I’m trying to enjoy the process of doing something a lot more than actually completing them. My lizard brain loves straightforward tasks that bring dopamine upon completion. This however can become detrimental sometimes because even if I did complete a project, I wasn’t more likely to do another one because I was not feeling the fun. i was just exhausted.
And yet, it can be fun.
Every once in a while, I would get it. I would get the “fun”. It’s taken a while and it won’t be perfect. At the very least, I’m writing these essays more often than not. I get a productive, creative hour and I can only get better.
The “fun” is not easy or natural to me. I have to fight for it. I am nobody special. Just another mote in the eye of the cosmos trying to exercise its capacity to organize information and memory and just…create. A simple, small act of magic. To me, human creativity no matter how crude or simple is a wonderful thing. So I must nurture it and fight for it every day.
So I will do my own thing. I will enjoy the process. It will spill over to other things in my life. It will change me. I must fight for meaning.
I must create my own meaning.
SeventhMoon 