Disclaimer: If you follow this as a prescription, you will get nowhere.
Joy, happiness, eudaimonia, flow, peace — whatever you call it.
That state where you need nothing more from life.
When you feel that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.
It is one of the most precious parts of being human. Yet it eludes most.
We are all born experts. Children know exactly how to reach this state and how to prolong it. And they will fight with their whole being if you try to pull them away.
But most lose this ability when they “grow up” and only stumble upon it occasionally. This happen when they begin to identify with what they do. When they start caring about perception and results.
Activities stop being ends in themselves. They become vehicles.
To gain approval.
To look good.
To achieve.
And so joy is replaced by optics.
You no longer enjoy the activity. You enjoy the perception of doing it. You enjoy how it makes you look. What it signals. What it says about you.
This infection spreads quietly.
Now, you cannot do anything “unproductive” without guilt. You cannot stumble into joy and let it be enough. You cannot follow curiosity without justification.
You choose your career, your friends, your partner, even your hobbies for how they will appear. You measure your life not by what it feels like to you, but by how it can be explained to others.
This is why you can’t sit alone in silence. Why you check your phone in every gap. Why you need to show the world what you’re doing before you can believe it yourself.
And you might fool yourself. You might mistake the satisfaction of constructing this facade for genuine joy. You might even carry it to your grave. Or it might collapse long before.
Like most, you probably abandoned the game of joy and exploration in childhood. You lost the ability to disappear into something for hours, forgetting space and time.
But you still know the feeling. Because at some point, you lived it.
And you are still capable of it.
The paradox is this: the state you now dismiss as “unproductive” was always the most productive of all.
When you are immersed in something for no reason, growth happens at the fastest pace. You absorb without effort. You create without planning. You master without grind.
Every true breakthrough you’ve ever had came in this state. Not when you were watching the clock, but when you forgot it entirely.
This is why the greatest work of your life is never produced when you are forcing yourself, never produced when you are anxiously measuring. It comes when you are lost, when the work is no longer separate from you.
Yet you’ve been taught to distrust this. To fear it. To call it indulgence. To feel guilty when you taste it.
So you sabotage yourself. You turn away from the state that could expand you the most. You sacrifice it for the endless grind of appearances. You mistake the applause of others for evidence that you are alive.
And this is why nothing ever feels like enough. Because the very thing that could restore you is the very thing you’ve learned to dismiss.
Children never needed a reason to play. That is why they develop faster than adults ever do. They don’t study growth. They don’t plan transformation. They simply live it.
You only began to stagnate when you stopped.
You don’t need more goals. You don’t need more discipline. You don’t need another plan for self-improvement. You need to remember how to lose yourself again.
You know exactly what you’ve abandoned. And you know exactly what it would take to return.
But you won’t.
You’ll nod along. You’ll agree. You’ll highlight the lines you like and tell yourself you understand. And then you’ll return to optimizing your facade. You’ll go back to the only game you know. You might even read this as another way to be “more productive”.
“Oh, so I have to find my childlike joy to do my best work”.
Stop it now.
Joy terrifies you. Freedom terrifies you. To choose them would mean abandoning the mask that has earned you approval your whole life.
It would mean being seen without your defenses. It would mean living without your excuses.
So you will cling to the grind. You will keep pretending. You will keep running from the one thing that could set you free.
And until you stop — if you ever stop — you will never know joy again.
Sincerely,
Milo Morrison