Everything Is a Practice

I don't know if it's age or not (I'm no spring chicken), but I do the same. As an example, I became quite skilled with the slingshot exactly this way. I set up a target catchbox between my office and my kitchen, and for a couple of years now, I take a couple of practice shots when I go between the two, or when I'm waiting for the microwave to finish, etc.

It was a year or so of doing this before I became a consistently good shot. Not quick, but if I had tried to set aside longer blocks of practice time, I wouldn't have done it at all.

Slow progress gets you to the finish line. No progress does not.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." — Aristotle

I don't think you're disagreeing with what you quote. Constantly moving the finish line is functionally the same as there being no finish line. The "finish line" becomes a milestone instead of an end.

> I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.

People often misunderstand the concept of "enlightenment" by thinking of it as an end state to be achieved. It's not. "Enlightenment" is not an achievable goal, it's a direction to walk along your path. The real thing is the walking of the path itself.

That's a relatable feeling.

My understanding is that the larger culture context, in which our worth is determined by our value as a worker, would be the locus of that feeling. Like, I really don't feel like a "better" person because I learned how to use the CLI more efficiently.

I may even find the term "better" in that context to be offensive: I'm not better because I learned how to deal with the shambling tower of shit that is WordPress at the institutional level. I enjoy the money and the security of a job, but I hate that my security is premised on my willingness to put up with that shitty system.

Ironically, the way that I've dealt with my own feelings about this has been to lean into dumb crap that obviously has no value in a larger context.

Learning chess or getting better at math are a couple of examples of things that it just felt fun and freeing to be better at, simply because I like them. Lately it's been card manipulations.

I've leaned into playing a lot of musical instruments, and I am fortunate to work from home as I play literally all day.

And that's been somewhat freeing because as much as I enjoy the feeling of improving some of my skills, that enjoyment has been often leveraged against me to get me to do jobs I hate. Like, I've spent a lot of time fixing dumb stuff just because I have learned how to enjoy the process, but since it's dumb stuff it's a bit soul crushing to do it unless I just want to do it.

In that context, I feel like I can draw a line between the stuff that really is fun and useful to me and the stuff I'm able to grind on because that's what I was trained to do.

That distinction has made my practice on a lot of things (from music to working on getting better at relating to people) feel more liberating and less like shitty hustle culture.

> self-improvement > productive

Self-improvement might be a 'productive' use of time in the capacity that it is viewed as a positive, but it's not defined exactly by productivity qua work. "Enjoying relationships" and sunshine is self-improvement for those who don't; you literally just said something prescriptive, which requires action, which makes it productive.

Take therapy for instance, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The whole point is to help you stop agonizing and indulging distorted thinking, to let go of things so you can better enjoy your life. That's self-improvement.

The problem with the rhetoric I see here is it's used as a deflection against change, when something's wrong. A bait-and-switch tactic. "Why worry about grinding away at juggling therapy and eating real food and doing the bare minimum exercise to stay healthy? Let's not stress ourselves. Drinking myself stupid 'sparks joy', I'll just not think about it, life is short [insert aphorism]".

I think there's an important difference between slowing down to enjoy life and making rationalizations against fixing problems.