I skipped a couple of weeks of writing. I had a busy time with some training, and work, and other stuff. But also, I got a bit lazy on this. That’s something that happens to me: I get all excited about stuff, and it goes smoothly, but then things become more routine and they lose the shine. Then, I procrastinate.
It’s not like I dislike the things I should be doing, or not want to do them, or lose interest. It’s more like inertia comes in and I lose momentum. I know people who just force through that and push against pain and frustration as a way of living. I used to envy them, but I stopped a while back.
Now I realise that’s not healthy, or smart. But, it’s also a bit more complicated, I think.
Hobbies and Hustles
There are some things I’ve been pondering for some time, that a book called Four Thousand Weeks distilled better than I ever could.
Burkeman writes about hobbies and hustles. Before the industrial revolution, people used to have things they did just because. They farmed when there was light. They rested when there wasn’t. They played music around the fire, not because they were “working on an album”.
Then, once time became a commodity, the whole idea of “productivity” showed up. Tasks. Outputs. Deadlines. And leisure got repositioned as “not-work”, which meant leisure itself needed to be justified.
The word “priority”, famously, first showed up in the 1400’s. But its plural form, “priorities”, only came into existence in the early twentieth century. It took us five hundred years to go from “the one thing that matters most” to “my list of things that matter most”. Once we had the plural, we never stopped adding to it.
And now everything has to be optimised for an outcome, an objective, a payout. You don’t just cook, you post the recipe. You don’t just run, you plan a marathon. You don’t just play music, you perform in front of an audience. You don’t just read, you track it on Goodreads. You don’t just travel, you collect the countries. You don’t just rest, you optimise your recovery.
The hobby becomes a hustle.
Hustles, unlike hobbies, come with targets, progress, milestones and plans. The thing that could be a release becomes another place where you can fail. The activity you enjoy becomes tainted by the goal.
Spoilers: the outcome is always unsatisfying. There will always be a longer ultra you must run, a cooler trip you must take, more followers you need on Instagram, another life changing book you should have finished, a better side project you should have shipped.
Happiness, it seems, is always one step away. And the post keeps moving.
For Its Own Sake
The philosopher Kieran Setiya talks about two different types of activities: telic and atelic. Activities that have a τέλος, a goal, and activities that don’t.
Telic activities are done for the sake of some end. Running a marathon. Finishing the book. Shipping the project. Once you’re done, you’re done. No goal, no activity.
Atelic activities are their own end. Going for a walk. Playing with your kids. Listening to a record. There’s no destination. Nothing is incomplete if you stop, and nothing is accomplished when you’re done. The activity is the thing.
Most of modern life is telic. We’re always building toward something: the next promotion, the next milestone, the next weekend. That changes the perspective of things, sometimes of things that shouldn’t be telic at all. Friendships start looking like contracts. Kids start looking like projects. Reading lists start looking like backlogs. Holidays start looking like deliverables.
And then we wonder why we feel tired all the time. Why nothing quite lands. Why the weekend passes like a blur and we needed it to recover from the last one.
Atelic things, on the other hand, can’t slip through your fingers because there’s nothing to grab. Walking is walking, it doesn’t matter where you’re going. Playing is playing. Talking to a friend for an hour is talking to a friend for an hour. There’s no destination to slip away from. It’s the only way I ever felt in “flow”.
You can tell the difference by how you feel when it’s over. A telic activity gives you a result. An atelic one gives you the time you spent on it. One fills your CV. The other fills your life.
The Treadmill
Here’s the trap. Hustles feed each other. When one gets boring, or the reward doesn’t land, you don’t step off the treadmill. You get on a new one. Different pace, same machine.
I’ve done it a hundred times.
Flying stopped being pure joy when I started having to do quizzes and get proficient at traffic circuits. Learning a new language turned into a Duolingo streak I hate but feel the need to maintain. Writing this blog, for a while, became about the weekly cadence and the need for it to be exciting, and inspiring, and perfect, instead of being the channel for the thing I actually had to say, and a venue to practice the act of writing, which I love.
The original thing (the thrill of your first positive rate of climb, the first chord that actually sounds just right, the moment you catch someone’s word and actually understand it), got buried under progress bars.
And here’s the thing: I put the progress bars there myself. Nobody asked me to. I did it because at some point I thought, “if I’m going to do this, I may as well get good at it.”
Which sounds reasonable. Which is the exact sentence that kills a hobby.
Getting good at something is telic. The moment a hobby becomes telic, for me, the joy starts leaking out. Slowly at first. Then all at once.
Slip Sliding Away
I spent the weekend in Copenhagen. It’s a pretty cool city, but the highlight was a front row seat to a Paul Simon’s concert (yeah, I’m bragging).
I’m a huge fan, and love his songs. One of them tells the story of an impossible love. He knows a man from his own town who falls in love for a woman called Dolores.
He loves her so much that it scares him. He thinks he’ll disappear. That makes him spin day after day, and slowly go crazy and behave badly towards her, but both him and Dolores think that one day they’ll get round to fixing it.
Dolores on the other hand is completely destroyed, day after day, by the man. A good day, for her, is when things are normal. On bad days, she’s depressed, and thinks about a life that could have been but hasn’t, because day after day things went down.
The couple eventually splits, but they have a son. The man drives a long way to explain to his estranged son what happened, why he did the things he did. He arrives, the son is sleeping. He kisses the boy, turns around and goes back home, he’ll do it another time, when the time will be right.
Things are never perfectly right, the world is never perfectly aligned.
The song ends like this:
God only knows, God makes his plan
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man
We work our jobs collect our pay
Believe were gliding down the highway
When in fact were slip sliding away
…
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip sliding away
I used to read that as being about failure. The more you try, the more it escapes you. The closer you get, the more it costs.
Sitting there in Copenhagen, maybe five metres from a man who has spent his life writing this stuff down, I read it differently.
The people in the song aren’t failing. They’re somewhere entirely else the whole time. The man chases a target that keeps moving. Dolores is stuck in a life she thinks she could have had. The son is asleep when the father finally shows up. Everyone is aimed at a place they never quite reach, while the highway moves too. For various reasons, this feels super close to the bone to me.
The destination is the trap. The thing you’re trying to reach is the thing that keeps you from being where you are. I’ve written about this before, in Remember to Live and Paradox of the Present. I keep circling back to it.
And so, about the procrastination. The weeks I skip. The momentum I lose.
I’m starting to think the inertia isn’t always laziness. Sometimes it’s a quiet signal that I’ve turned something into a hustle that wasn’t supposed to be one. The walk became a step count. The writing became a schedule. The music became a set list. The shine doesn’t vanish because I got lazy. It vanishes because the activity stopped being itself.
Not always, of course. Sometimes I just need to get on with it. A telic job needs telic discipline. You don’t ship a product by going for walks.
But the atelic stuff, the stuff that was supposed to be for its own sake, it doesn’t bend. You can’t force a walk into being restorative. You can’t schedule flow. You can’t hustle your way into joy.
I want to write because I want to write. Not because I need to publish something amazing every Thursday at ten o’clock.
I’m still figuring out which is which.
But when Paul Simon sang “the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away”, I wasn’t thinking about failure anymore. I was thinking about wandering in Copenhagen the next day, improvising a wacky quartet with my kids and wife, writing just to dump a thought that has been circling in my head.
The destination is a lie. The road is where you live.
And sometimes, on the road, you slip and slide away.