The world doesn't need you optimized- it needs you alive.
Why doing what you love can be the cure to your exhaustion
I’m drawn to people who are in love with something—even if I don’t love it for myself. I don’t have to understand it. There’s something about being around people who’s lit up from the inside doing what they love. It’s magnetic. Electric. Alive like oxygen.
I’m the kind of person who will slow down and pause for a good ol’ street performer in the middle of a busy downtown. While the rest of my family has already made it down another block, I’ll stand there a little longer than I should, watching someone sing their heart out or move their body like the world isn’t watching. There’s something about witnessing someone, in real time, disappear into their joy. Or even when I’m meeting a new friend and they completely geek out about something. I have seen passionate janitors light up cleaning the floors. Or mechanics with soiled nails and rough hands but full hearts. Librarians diving into must read books. Even if none of it lands with me, it’s the way their eyes light up when they talk about it that does. Their excitement is contagious and they give me joy.
This has followed me into motherhood too. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be listening to Moana singing How Far I’ll Go on repeat again and again. But when I get to watch the way my daughter lights up when she sings and dances to it? When she disappears into it completely? That fills me up. Her happiness makes me happy.
But the problem is this: fewer and fewer people are doing what they love.
Instead, we’re distancing ourselves from the very things that make us feel alive.
Sometimes I try to remember what life felt like before smartphones and social media. I picture everyone tucked inside the four walls of their home, giving themselves fully to something they enjoyed. Playing cards at the kitchen table for hours, painting late into the night, making up choreography to their favorite songs (I wish I still had home videos of these times), practicing an instrumental, shooting hoops, building something just because it felt good to build. There was time to deeply sink into things. To get lost. To be bored long enough to create something out of nothing.
Our minds were more present then. More focused. Less fragmented. We weren’t pulled in ten directions at once. We weren’t feeling this unconscious urge to record everything we were doing to share online with the internet. We could stay with one thing long enough for it to change us.
What we don’t often talk about is how even the most “innocent” scrolling has trained our brains to be undisciplined and distracted. We are barely able to stay with one task, one feeling, one desire before reaching for another. If our brains were computer browsers, it’s as if we keep opening new tabs without ever finishing what we opened the first one for. Eventually the whole browser crashes under it’s own weight. Because it’s overloaded.
And we call that burn out.
But I don’t think we’re as tired as we think we are, the way we think we are.
I think we’re tired because we’ve stopped doing what we love.
We tell ourselves we’re burnt out from working too much, from parenting, from keeping up, from the weight of the world. And yes–those things are real. Life is demanding. But I also believe that spending time doing what you love is one the greatest cures for exhaustion. I’m not talking about the kind of exhaustion that a good night’s sleep can fix, I’m talking about the kind that comes from being disconnected from yourself.
Even now as a mom on days when I’ve barely slept (which, thankfully, are fewer lately)- I feel more energized when I carve out even a small moment for something I enjoy. It could be making a hot cup of matcha or cappuccino, it could be plating my food before eating it, it could be drawing or singing– all woven into the day – all those little moments of doing what I love makes me feel energized. Grounded. Like I’ve been plugged back into myself. It restores me. The energy doesn’t come from rest alone, it comes from a liveliness that doing what we love draws out from the inside. Every time I intentionally devote myself to doing something that brings me joy, it charges my batteries.
So many of us are burnt out because somewhere along the lines, we stopped paying attention to ourselves and more attention to everyone else.
Every time you open an app, you’re turning your attention outward, into other people’s lives. What they’re doing. How they’re doing it. What they think. Why do they think it. Slowly, subtly, you drift further away from your own inner world. From your own curiosity. From your own creativity. From the things that light you up. You stop paying attention to your body, your posture and most times, you may even be clenching your jaw and barely breathing.
Almost without noticing, you become over consumers and under creators.
And when you stop creating, something in you withers.
You stop creating not because you don’t have anything left to give but because you forgot how to listen to the part of yourself that wants to give it. Creating doesn’t have to mean art you share online or become work that earns you money. It can be private and messy. It can be completely pointless with no aim or direction. Creating is simply an act of engaging with something you love without needing validation. It’s about choosing presence over performance and depth over distraction.
So perhaps the quiet rebellion of our time isn’t productivity, or hustle, or optimization.
Perhaps it’s about falling back in love with something and protecting that love fiercely.
Maybe it’s to remember, to return to a time when we could just sit with one thing until that one thing made time disappear. The thing you loved before you learned to measure your worth.
Before productivity, visibility, and optimization entered the room.
Maybe it’s an invitation to turn off the noise. Close the tabs. Let yourself be a beginner again.
Because the world doesn’t need more tired people consuming each other’s lives.
It needs more people who are alive. Lost in their joy. Creating for the sake of it. Reminding the rest of us what it looks like to fully be here.
The world doesn’t need you to be perfectly optimized and robotic.
It needs you lit up and alive.
The most generous thing you can offer the world isn’t your productivity.
It’s your aliveness.
I think that’s why I always stop for street performers. Why I linger when everyone else keeps walking.
Because in a world that’s rushing, scrolling, documenting, and measuring itself, someone standing there singing like no one is watching feels like fresh air.
A reminder of who we were before we learned to look away from ourselves.🍵
Warmly,
