11/12/2026
Your soul is starving.
Having been in the corporate world for about 3 years, meeting someone new typically follows this script: What do you do? Where do you work? Do you like it? What's your five year plan? As though the most efficient way to understand another human being is to establish how they contribute to the economy. Also what the fuck is a five year plan?
And, to be fair, I understand the appeal. A job is an easy answer. It’s my go-to all of the time. It gives people something tangible to attach to your name. It establishes a certain level of ambition, responsibility, and, depending on the title, perhaps a bit of social currency. We spend a considerable amount of time trying to become someone professionally. Climbing, building, networking, collecting experiences that might eventually make us more valuable to somebody else.
But I couldn’t help but wonder when we decided that being employable and being interesting were interchangeable.
We've made a habit of treating our personalities like extensions of our résumés. Our interests become talking points, our hobbies become potential side hustles, and our free time becomes another opportunity to get ahead.
We've become very good at justifying the things we enjoy.
I want to know what you do when nobody is paying you. What you read when it isn't required, what you collect without any intention of selling, what you spend your Sundays researching for no reason. I want to know the music you insist everyone should listen to, the obscure historical fact you bring up at dinner, the city you've decided you must visit because you read one book about it.
I want to know what makes up your own individuality.
Because I think we've underestimated how much of ourselves is developed outside the workplace.
There is a difference between being impressive and being interesting. One can be acquired through a relatively straightforward combination of hard work and credentials. The other requires a little more curiosity.
It requires having interests that won’t necessarily make sense to anybody else. Developing opinions that aren't borrowed from the people around you. Being willing to spend time becoming good at something that will never bring you currency. It means allowing yourself to be a beginner, to be bad at something, to have an interest that is entirely impractical and maybe even embarrassing.
Somewhere along the way, the pleasure of participation became secondary to the promise of achievement.
We've managed to turn our leisure into labor. Running has become a personal record, reading has become a Goodreads challenge, cooking has become an opportunity to build an audience. Every interest seems to come with the expectation that it should eventually produce something.
A following. An income. An achievement. Something we can point to and say, see, this was worth my time.
But what if the time was the point?
What if you took a pottery class and made twelve particularly ugly bowls? What if you learned French and spent the first six months confidently ordering things incorrectly? What if you became obsessed with the history of a fashion house, memorized the names of every creative director, and never worked a day in fashion? What if you simply liked something?
I don't think we give ourselves enough permission to enjoy things without needing to become exceptional at them.
I've found that the things I enjoy most about myself have very little to do with what I do for a living. I spend an egregious amount of time studying fashion history, reading books, and writing these essays for my blog I would die for. I have a guitar that I'm slowly learning to play for the past 6 years, a miniature DJ controller that has recently convinced me I could probably be quite good at making people dance, and a running list of languages I'd like to speak fluently before I die. I've thrown myself out of an airplane multiple times, spent nights dancing until I forget what time it is, and developed an almost unreasonable enthusiasm for trying things I've never done before.
I'm not particularly good at all of these things. Some of them I'm barely good at at all. But that is the point of all of it. I don't need to be a fashion historian, a professional musician, a fluent polyglot, or a DJ with a residency somewhere in Berlin. I just like having something to learn, something to look forward to, something that makes me feel a little more connected to the world outside of my own routine.
Welcome to the chase, or my perception of it. Not mastery nor achievement. Just the feeling of being a person who is perpetually discovering something new about herself and the world around her.
I don't want to become everything, I want to experience everything.
Be the person who knows a little about a lot. Have enough interests to keep surprising yourself. Enough curiosity to keep changing your mind. Enough enthusiasm to say yes to something simply because you’ve never done it before.
I'm not suggesting that ambition is misplaced or that we should all abandon our careers in pursuit of some whimsical existence. Having a job is vital. I like having professional goals. I like the satisfaction of being good at something and the independence that comes with earning my own money. But I also think there is something terribly limiting about allowing the thing that occupies most of your waking hours to become the thing that defines your entire personality.
There is a whole person waiting outside of your office.
Focus on what makes you alive.