Asklemmy

43895 readers

1068 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Can anything be worth doing? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Definitely a "woah bruh 420 blaze it" kind of thought this eve, but I'm wondering if there is a philosophy, lifestyle, or technique that addresses this:

I often wish for some way of making anything worth doing, therefore removing the need to judge whether something is worth doing.

Many hours of my "free time" outside of work are a struggle of meta-evaluation re: "time investment" and feel it would be so much more peaceful to outgrow this mindset

Edit: Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and advice. Seeing both simple truths and nuanced anecdotes makes for wonderful reading, and I'm glad I put this question out there ✨

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The act of engaging fully in things without worrying about their value is called “playing”.

My advice, if you need a formal way to start playing, would be to join an acting class and then act in some roles.

Being an actor requires you to be able to go all in regardless of how real or fake a thing is. It will allow you to practice decoupling your investment from any evaluation of whether it’s worth it.

Like, if you’re playing an Oompah Loompah, you will act out being very concerned with the running of candy-making machines, despite having zero call for such focus in real life.

This is why we call it “acting”. It’s acting in the sense a robot’s “actuators” are its output. As an actor you cease focus on input and processing, and put all of your focus on your output, your action.

Which is, in a particular way, exactly what your question is asking for.