It’s Sunday. It’s raining outside and you’re flat on the sofa. Hoodie on, sweatpants and fuzzy slippers. Your favourite show is on TV. It’s 3 p.m.
So far today, you’ve moved from the bedroom to the kitchen, opened the fridge, poured yourself some orange juice and planted yourself on the couch. Five minutes later, you opened the door for a food delivery. The pizza box is still sitting open on the table.
And then the thought creeps in.
God, I’ve done absolutely nothing today.
Somehow, a perfectly enjoyable Sunday has started to feel like a wasted one.
It’s strange how difficult it has become to let enjoyment justify itself.
We seem to want our time to produce something. Progress. Improvement. Money. Health. Knowledge. Something to show for it.
And increasingly, the things we enjoy seem to acquire a next step.
You like running? Track it.
You enjoy baking? Sell it.
You write? Publish it.
You have an interesting hobby? Make content about it.
When did everything we enjoy need to lead to something?
None of this is inherently bad. I am writing this and publishing it, after all.
When we love something, it is natural to want to become better at it. Turning something you enjoy into your work can be an immense privilege. Ambition is exciting. It gives us something to work towards.
But somewhere between enjoying something and wanting it to become something, the expectation changes.
Leaving it alone can start to feel like the inferior option.
Not improving it. Not tracking it. Not sharing it. Not selling it. Just doing it because you like doing it.
And it goes beyond hobbies. We have become excellent at giving almost everything we do a productive justification.
We walk to improve our health.
We work out to become a better version of ourselves.
We travel to broaden our perspective.
We read to learn something.
Hell, we even rest so we can be more productive later.
All perfectly good reasons.
But what happened to:
I do it because I like it.
Full stop.
No personal growth. No knowledge to share with the world. No lesson learned. No future business venture. No underlying health benefit. No audience.
Last Christmas, I found myself colouring in pre-drawn Christmas cards with glitter pens. Ironically, I had bought them after seeing someone colouring with them on Instagram.
At first, I was glad nobody could see me. I almost felt embarrassed. A fully grown adult colouring in Christmas cards with glitter pens.
But then I kept going.
Some nights I coloured five. Some nights I didn’t colour any. I didn’t need to finish 50 cards by December 15th. I picked the ones I liked and left the others.
Every night, before I went to bed, I laid the finished cards out on the kitchen table to dry.
And every night, I smiled.
I liked doing it.
That was it.
Yes, technically I was still producing something. There were Christmas cards at the end of it. But I wasn’t trying to become better at colouring them. I wasn’t building towards anything. I wasn’t even particularly interested in whether they were good.
It sounds almost too simple to be worth saying.
Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe that is what we have become uncomfortable with: letting something be enough on its own.
We talk about “wasting time” as though time only counts when something comes out of it.
An afternoon with nothing to show for it. An interest that goes nowhere. Something we never become particularly good at. Even describing them that way makes them sound like failures.
But if we enjoyed the time, what exactly did we waste?