Today, many people feel stuck in a mindset that insists every experience must teach us something useful. This focus on always being productive makes us see life as a draft that needs endless improvement, which can lead to burnout and ongoing dissatisfaction. Constantly searching for a deeper reason behind everything, like in ‘Start With Why’ or karmic thinking, can pull us away from simply experiencing the present moment. Real freedom comes when we accept that it’s okay not to be productive all the time, and that our value doesn’t depend on what we gain from our struggles or careers. When we move from always trying to be productive to simply enjoying life, we stop acting for an invisible audience and start living in tune with our true nature, instead of always trying to optimize ourselves like machines.

For a very long time, I was stuck in the mindset that everything that existed needed justification. It’s the mindset found in books like Start With Why.

Generally, self-help only perpetuates this notion as we’ve begun to see every failure as a lesson. I would look at my past mistakes with the idea that something needed to be learned from them, but now I’m of the mindset that things happen simply because they happened.

Whenever we face a devastating loss, we also feel obligated to find the silver lining. When we are faced with sickness, we are meant to find the karmic reasoning (even if you don’t believe in karma). It’s a demand for a narrative. This happened because of this.

Psychological research into narrative identity suggests that while humans are wired to ‘smooth out’ chaos into stories, this process often prioritizes a clean plot over raw reality.

If we can predict cause and effect, we can see our lives unfold like a movie and eventually arrive at the moral of the story.

The problem with living our lives like a story is that we no longer live, but try to edit the script. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have been in conversations where, after 15 minutes, I start to ruminate on what I should have said.

We are no longer human. We are a brand. Eventually, the need to see everything as a teaching tool becomes exhausting.

We take our actions and make them symbolic. The mistake is only a mistake. However, a mistake is also seen as a sign from the universe. By projecting symbolism onto an action, we now have something to do. We can now fix the mistake, which more likely means fixing ourselves.

No, we don’t live. We treat every aspect of our lives as a rough draft that needs professional editing. We look for insights because, if we can name the why behind our pain, we believe the pain disappears. This is the entire basis of therapy.

The truth is, the why is a distraction from what is right now.

We go into therapy believing that my depression is a symbol of my unhealed childhood. Once I decode this, I’ll be free. The truth is that we can feel the heaviness without giving it a label.

It exists without justification. It needs no name and no history. It’s only a sensation.

The need to justify the existence of anything is the projection of our need to justify ourselves and our own lives. Yet, no one’s asked you to do that.

You are perfect as you are, not because you found meaning in your life, but simply because you exist. Any sense of purposelessness is self-inflicted, as we place too much weight on our expectations.

We Only Value What We Can Use

Quick Summary: Narrative Transactionalism happens when people see experiences only in terms of what they can gain mentally or spiritually, making life feel like a series of trades rather than something valuable on its own.

It’s kind of interesting how we tend not to value anything that doesn’t give us utility. The pebble on the ground is worthless to us because we can’t use it for anything.

Societal demands often conflate instrumental value (what an experience can produce) with intrinsic value (the inherent worth of the moment itself).”

It only gets worse when we start to discover the psychological and spiritual aspects of ourselves. We read the books, go to church, and meet with others, picking and choosing what we can use. We only listen to find the lesson, or the cautionary tale.

As a result, we’ve turned our relationship with reality into a transaction. We tell ourselves this grief is needed because it will make me more compassionate. We say that we will endure the failure because it will only lead to greater success.

Consequently, we are terrified of a completely useless experience. The idea that something may not be happening for something else is quite a frightening experience.

The funny part is that the expectation that something is supposed to happen for our benefit isn’t ours. It’s society’s demand that every minute of your life be productive.

If you can’t produce meaning, you will be judged as stagnant. But nothing is wrong with being stagnant. Stagnation is one’s refusal to be a machine.

We believe that we must extract value from every moment of our lives to justify our place. The truth is that your worth is inherent and cannot be increased by lessons or decreased by a belief in wasting one’s life.

We hate it when we are in meaningless moments, but we must come to the conclusion that the meaningless moment is the only time when we are free. We are free when we no longer feel the need to be productive.

This means that we don’t need a purpose. It sounds scary because we’ve always been taught that we do. Yet, nothing is threatened if we don’t.

Your non-productive hours are no different from those of a baby. Here is where we find innocence. You are not performing or improving. You just are.

In losing the need to justify our lives, we’ve come home like the prodigal son. The father doesn’t love his son simply because he returned, not because of the lessons that were learned.

Be Where You Are

Quick Summary Dead-end experiences and meaningless periods lack linear ROI but serve as essential catalysts for unlearning the societal requirement for constant progression and the struggle to resume-building.

The moments that feel like a total waste are the most profound.

You spent years with someone you thought was the love of your life, but the breakup has taught you nothing but pain. You took a career detour, but learned no new skills. Even worse, you may have spent many months in the dark cloud of depression, leaving you useless to the world.

We think these cases are useless because they lack a return on investment. These examples are profound in their uselessness. Our ego is trying to find what we can still do about them.

Society tells us to avoid dead ends. We shouldn’t do anything unless it counts on our resume. As a result, there’s a bit of shame when we realize our actions didn’t amount to anything. The struggle we endured didn’t actually make us stronger.

Progress is our new god, and we are the lowly sinner.

Ironically, the shame we feel has some utility. It tells us we should let go of the “good, successful person” persona.

The problem with progression is that we are made to believe that it’s linear. We are made to believe that every experience is a rung on a ladder that we are all climbing. A useless experience is a broken rung. What’s broken needs fixing, right?

A shift in perspective shows us that there is no ladder. Any experience that leads you to a dead end forces you to be where you are.

Philosophical critiques of the ‘Progress God’ argue that a human life is not a project to be completed, but a state of being that remains perfect even in stagnation.”

Any moment where we haven’t learned anything is the perfect moment to unlearn the need for lessons.

Life Doesn’t Require Adjectives

Quick Summary: Qualitative judgment—categorizing moments as “good” or “bad”—places a cognitive burden on users, preventing direct engagement with reality, as they seek meaningful experiences rather than raw existence.

I’m learning that adjectives are probably the worst thing to happen to grammar. If we don’t qualify something with our judgment, it feels like we lose our grip on reality. If we don’t see things as beautiful or tragic, as good or bad, we believe they hold no substance.

Due to this belief, we judge just about everything. Every day, we walk around with the burden of needing to know whether any second of our lives is good or bad.

We don’t want life, we want a good life. We don’t want experiences; we want meaningful experiences.

Somehow, we believe we must categorize our experiences as good to avoid the bad ones. The truth is that the experience just happened. The judgment we place on it is just noise.

Living Life as a Child

Quick Summary: Radical play is about rejecting the idea that everything we do has to serve a purpose. It’s when we do things just for the fun of it, not to meet social or work expectations.

What happens when you remove the need to be productive and the need to judge everything as good and bad? You start to play.

Play doesn’t need a meaningful end. Play only exists for its own reward.

I can say with all the confidence in the world that my life, thus far, has been a performance. I’m performing for an imaginary audience. I thought my life would be a progression of going to school, getting my degree, and getting a job. a “good” job. My entire life, I was just checking off boxes.

I don’t know how I’m going to play more because society doesn’t offer up an alternative to the life we live. I just know slowly, but surely, I’m willing to take off the costume and get off the stage.

By play, I don’t mean practice. No more discipline is needed. The biggest barrier for me and for all of us adults is allowing ourselves to play.

Just recently, my family went to an arcade and a pizza place for my nephew’s birthday. When it was time to go into the arcade to play, my mom was reluctant. She said that she doesn’t like games. She wasn’t good at them. In other words, they aren’t productive.

It took a minute, but my mom finally let loose. It was wonderful to see the joy on her face as we played skeeball, shot hoops, and played Space Invaders with my nephew. This is what life is about.

When we play without purpose, we fulfill our true function of simply enjoying life.

Emerging psychological perspectives are beginning to validate purposeful living, suggesting that the happiest states often occur when the ‘why’ is entirely absent.

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