"What for?"
The question arrives naturally, when I mention learning to sketch. A software engineer picking up gesture drawing seems either unusual, or people simply wonder because the skill appears to offer nothing for the actual work.
I think we have quietly learned, from the structure around us, from work, from friends, from social media, that productivity is the measure of worth. A project that does not increase your output is considered useless, unsuitable, sometimes not worth doing at all.
I remember the first time I wrote code. It was eleventh grade. Programming was pure curiosity then. I wondered how people built applications, games, whole worlds from nothing. I learned to make apps, to make games, from that same curiosity. Looking back, learning to code gave no useful value to someone about to sit university entrance exams.
The pure joy of that curiosity and enjoyment seems to be quietly leaving my life.
The same impulse, to be productive, to be fast, spread to reading. It must be methodical, fast, retained long.
But reading has never really been only about collecting and remembering information. For me, reading is closer to music: the time spent experiencing and feeling has value equal to the information it delivers, sometimes more. When you read fast, you collect ideas. When you read slowly, you live with them, because the idea is felt, understood, sat with. And perhaps this is true of more than books.
The pure joy of experience and curiosity, unaffected by performance metrics, by KPIs, by anything other than itself.
This sounds appealing. But perhaps pure joy is a privilege of the unencumbered, people who have all the time in the world.
The ancient Greeks had a word for the time that makes it possible: skholē. Usually translated as "leisure," its original meaning runs deeper: time freed from all obligation, so a person can pursue something for its own sake. Skholē is the root of the English word "school." Which suggests that learning, in its original form, was not about optimization. It was about allowing curiosity and pure joy to develop.
The problem is we cannot remove the external world entirely. Life has constraints and responsibilities, and efficiency and productivity genuinely matter. But I think we can carve out small spaces to preserve some of that pure joy.
Call them sanctuaries of inspiration: stretches of time or projects that belong to no achievement system, where the answer to "Why are you doing this?" is simply "Because I want to." That might be an evening each week to read a book I am curious about, useless to my work, the way I once read a Vietnamese dictionary as a software engineer. Or a project no one knows about, no one evaluates. Or tinkering with something just to understand a little more about how the world works.
I write this blog partly for selfish reasons: to force myself to stay with an idea long enough to see it clearly and explain it. And writing is perhaps the slowest reading I know.
And sometimes, while writing, I find again those evenings from before — when there were no metrics at all, when I was simply pulled into something and did not want to stop.