The pen is heavy in my hand, far heavier than its 7 grams of plastic and ink. It’s the weight of the empty hour ahead. An hour that accuses. An hour that could be filled with folding the laundry that has lived in the basket for three days, or answering the 47 unread emails blinking with miniature urgency, or finally learning how to properly chop an onion from a cheerful, fast-talking chef on YouTube. Productive things. Measurable things.
Instead, there is this pen. And this blank page. And the quiet, screaming shame of wanting to do nothing that matters.
This mindset is a virus.
It turns hobbies into side-hustles, play into practice, and rest into a scheduled task on a color-coded calendar. The result is a population of people who are terrified of an empty notebook. An empty page has no goal. It offers no return on investment. It whispers a deeply uncomfortable truth: that you might just be a person, not a project to be managed.
The Weight of Discarded Potential
I feel this acutely because I made a mistake a few years back, one that still curls in my gut when I think about it. I found a box of old journals, nearly a decade’s worth. They were filled with nonsense-fragments of dreams, terrible poetry, complaints about work, and endless, sprawling doodles in the margins. I read through a few pages, cringed at the person I was, and decided they were useless. They weren’t a manuscript. They weren’t a documented plan for success. They were just… noise. So I threw them all out. Every last one.
The immediate feeling wasn’t relief; it was a strange, hollow silence.
I had just thrown away the only existing record of my mind at play.
I’ve spent the years since trying to understand what I actually discarded. It wasn’t just paper. It was the evidence of a mind not trying to be useful. A mind untethered from expectation. I used to believe that this kind of aimless creation was only valuable if it led somewhere-if a doodle became a blueprint for a real painting, if a journal entry sparked a profitable idea.
This is the logic of the factory floor, not the human soul.
The Ghost of Frederick Winslow Taylor
This obsession with utility has deep roots. It’s the ghost of Frederick Winslow Taylor, pacing the factory floor with his stopwatch in 1907, breaking down every human movement into its most efficient components. He wanted to eliminate wasted motion in steelworkers. But his philosophy escaped the mill. It crept into our offices, then our homes, and finally, into our heads. We started applying the principles of scientific management to our own joy. We believe, deep down, that every moment must be optimized for maximum output.
Isla’s Secret Rebellion
I once knew a woman who worked in a place that was the absolute pinnacle of optimization. Her name was Isla M.-L., and she was a cook on a nuclear submarine. Her world was a steel tube 237 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, a place where every inch of space and every second of time was accounted for. Her job was to turn freeze-dried and canned goods into 477 nutritionally balanced meals a day for a crew of 77. Efficiency was not a goal; it was the only thing keeping everyone alive and sane.
A World of Pure Function
Every system designed for purpose, no room for the extraneous.
Isla’s Secret Notebook
In it, she drew impossible things. Deep-sea creatures with bioluminescent wings, coral reefs that grew into sprawling cities, and fantastical navigation charts for oceans on other planets.
Her most important tool: a specific type of
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They were about useless, magnificent beauty. She told me once that the most important tool she had wasn’t her chef’s knife, but a specific type of erasable pen she’d brought on board. The ability to make a mark and then make it disappear without a trace felt like a miracle in that high-stakes environment. It was permission to be wrong, to be messy, to create without the pressure of permanence.
Her drawings were a release valve for a mind trapped in a world of pure function. They were her oxygen. They served no purpose for the submarine, for the mission, for the navy. They served her. They kept the human part of her alive in the belly of the machine.
Your value is not your output.
The radical truth that sets us free.
This is the idea we resist the most. Our culture has so deeply intertwined our worth with our productivity that we see purposelessness as a character flaw. We call it lazy. Unmotivated. Wasteful. But from a biological standpoint, this is absurd. Look at any animal-a kitten chasing a string, a dolphin leaping from the water, a crow sliding down a snowy roof. They are engaging in play. Play is the brain’s natural mode of exploration, of learning, of existing without the pressure of survival. It’s how we integrate experiences and test boundaries in a low-stakes environment.
But we, the clever apes with spreadsheets and five-year plans, have tried to engineer this fundamental drive out of ourselves. We have pathologized our own nature. We feel guilty for the very thing that makes us resilient and creative.
An Invitation to Waste Time
I think back to my lost journals. The person who wrote and doodled in them wasn’t trying to become a better version of himself. He was just… being. The scribbles weren’t a means to an end; they were the end. The point of the doodle is the doodling. The purpose of the aimless walk is the walking. There is no hidden lesson or secret productivity hack to be found. And that is the entire point.
It is a radical act of self-acceptance to do something that will not appear on a resume, that will not make you any money, that will not improve your body or your mind in any quantifiable way.
So here is the pen, still feeling heavy in my hand. But the weight has changed. It is no longer the weight of accusation. It’s the weight of potential, but not for a project or a product. It’s the weight of a quiet, unproductive, and profoundly necessary joy.
