Do a Thing Just Because You Like It

It's reason enough

If you’re in the US and have a long weekend for Thanksgiving, I can imagine your to do list could be anything from “cook feast” to “avoid Uncle Mike” to “drive, wait, fly, drive, eat, sleep, drive, wait, fly, drive, crawl into hole”. Sometimes there’s just a lot going on, no matter your plans.

What I hope for you (and for me), amidst it all, is finding some time to fuck off.

Because you deserve it.

Do a Thing Just Because You Like It
(excerpt from Today Was Fun)

There’s a word to describe activities that you do simply for their own sake: atelic. The prefix a- means “not,” and the -telic comes from telos in Greek, which means “end or goal.” In other words, atelic means activities with no goal. They’re things like going for a walk because it’s fun and not because you need to get your steps in. The activity is the reward. 

I haven’t always been great at atelic activities. They used to feel almost wrong. Somehow, through education and culture and work and capitalism, I found myself conditioned to be constantly optimizing something. If I wasn’t working, I was trying to improve my health, my relationships, or my home. It’s why I used to be a terrible fiction reader. Is the only thing I’m going to get out of this ENJOYMENT? That doesn’t sound right...  

Anyway, that’s how it used to go in my head. And sometimes I still have to whac-a-mole those thoughts back down.  

You might be thinking, “Oh, I take vacations! And I exercise. And I read.” But do you think of vacations as in service of your family? Exercise in service of your health? Reading in service of building your skills? If so, as wonderful as those things are, they are not atelic. 

What I hope for you, for me, for every human on the planet, is that we all feel deserving of doing things JUST BECAUSE WE LIKE THEM. If I were the queen (of anything really), I would declare jigsaw puzzles a human right. Totally useless. All joy.

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I’m thankful that you allow me into your inbox and brain each week.

With gratitude,

Bree

Please like/share/restack this post if you enjoyed it. It really helps me help more people have better days at work. Thanks, truly.