Walk into any bookstore and the self-help shelf will grab you by the collar and start shouting. Find Your Purpose. Optimize Your Mornings. Unlock Your Highest Self. It reads less like wisdom and more like a performance review for someone the universe is about to lay off.
I know this anxiety intimately, because I am an engineer, and engineers do not experience a Saturday — we schedule it. We keep a to-do list for our hobbies. We feel a flicker of guilt when a walk doesn’t produce at least one usable insight. Somewhere along the way we decided that an unmeasured moment is a wasted one, and we have been quietly miserable about it ever since.
So here is the most useful thing I’ve thought about all year, and it is also the most useless: most of the good stuff in life has no point whatsoever, and that is precisely why it’s good.
We Started Worshipping the Logs Instead of the System
Here’s a tell. At any university, the single most fiercely guarded document is the transcript. Grades live in a fireproof safe, behind audit trails, treated like the crown jewels. The library, meanwhile — the actual knowledge, the entire reason the building exists — can more or less fend for itself.
We did the same thing to ourselves. The record of the thing became more important than the thing. We have step counts but no walks, reading lists but no reading, “learnings” captured in a doc that no one will ever open again. I have personally finished a book and felt the achievement land not when I understood it, but when I marked it complete in an app. That’s not learning. That’s record-keeping. I’d built a gorgeous scoreboard for a game I forgot to actually play.
”Scholar” Used to Mean “Person With Free Time”
The word scholar comes from a root meaning leisure. Originally it described someone lucky enough to have nothing pressing to do — free to sit and read poetry and chase an idea down a hole for no reason other than the hole was interesting.
Look what we’ve done to it. Now we sprint through accelerated programs to earn the certificate that qualifies us for the job that funds the two weeks of vacation we’ll spend answering email. We don’t even rest properly. We “recharge” — a word we borrowed from batteries, which is telling. If the only reason you’re relaxing is to come back a more efficient unit of labor, you are not relaxing. You are performing maintenance on the machine. The machine is you. Nobody told you that you were the machine.
The Blunt Truth: You Are a Tube
Let me strip away the existential grandeur, because it helps.
Biologically, you are a tube. You take things in one end and you let them out the other. That’s the headline feature. To run this operation more efficiently, evolution bolted a nerve cluster onto the front — a head — and gave it cameras and little antennas, whose entire job is to go find more stuff to put in the tube. Eventually the tube wears out. So, with enormous ceremony and very expensive weddings, we build additional smaller tubes to carry on the proud work of putting things in one end and letting them out the other.
And we take this unbelievably seriously. We give the tube a LinkedIn. We send the tube to therapy for not having enough purpose. There is something deeply freeing about remembering that the cosmos’s most over-engineered ambition, when you zoom out far enough, is essentially a digestive system that learned to feel insecure about itself.
Music Doesn’t Have a Finish Line
Here’s the argument that actually rearranged something in my head.
Consider music. A symphony is the most purposeless thing imaginable — it produces nothing, it solves nothing, it doesn’t arrive anywhere. And yet. If the point of a symphony were to reach the final bar, then the greatest conductor alive would simply be the one who finished first. We’d judge orchestras like drag races. The fastest Ode to Joy wins.
Obviously that’s insane. The whole value is in the middle, in the part that is going nowhere. The same is true of dancing. When you dance, you are not trying to get somewhere — you don’t shuffle frantically toward a target X on the floor and high-five yourself for arriving. The destination of a dance is the dance.
And then the gut punch: we somehow agree about this for music and dancing, and then turn around and treat our entire lives like a race to the final bar. We rush every movement to get to the next one, as if the last note — and you know exactly which note that is — were the goal. It is not the goal. There is no goal. There’s just the playing.
Even Paradise, By All Accounts, Is Pointless
I find it funny that we can’t even imagine a purposeful heaven. When people describe it, the picture is always angels standing around singing “Hallelujah” forever — which, if you think about it, means precisely nothing. It’s not productive. No one’s shipping anything. They’re just… having a ball. Eternally. On purpose, with no purpose.
If the best afterlife our species can dream up is an infinite jam session with no deliverables, that should tell us something about what we actually want and refuse to let ourselves have.
The way I’ve started thinking of it: any good game begins with exactly two rules. First, you have to draw a line somewhere — pick the edges of the board, agree on what counts, otherwise there’s no game to play. And second: have a ball. That’s the whole rulebook. We’re extremely good at the first rule. We draw lines everywhere — targets, deadlines, five-year plans, the line between “productive” and “wasting time.” We have just completely forgotten the second one.
You Have to Let Go of the Ashtray
The last piece is about control, and it’s the hardest.
Say you want to throw something across a room and hit a target. You cannot do it by gripping the object so tightly, so afraid of missing, that you walk over and press it against the target by hand. That guarantees a hit and is also not throwing. To actually throw, you have to release — you have to hand the thing over to the air and trust the arc you can no longer control.
That’s the bit I keep failing at and keep coming back to. The life I’m most afraid of “missing” is the one I’m strangling in my fist. Aim, yes. Set it up well, sure. But at some point you have to open your hand and trust the throw, and let the moment be whatever it’s going to be, unmeasured, un-optimized, possibly imperfect.
So: stop trying to extract a TED talk from every pebble on the beach. Stop optimizing your weekends. You are a tube, which is hilarious and lets you off the hook for a great deal. You are a dancer who keeps sprinting toward the edge of the floor for no reason. You are an angel humming pleasant nonsense into the void.
Draw your line. Then, for once, do the second part.
Go outside, find a stick, whack a tree stump with it for no reason whatsoever, and have a ball.