Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. - Oliver Burkeman

The truth, then is that spending at least some of your leisure time "wastefully", focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it - to be truly at leisure rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement.

You want it to be one way. But it's the other way. – Marlo Stanfield in The Wire

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they're truly happy in a way that the rest of us — pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment — are not. This also helps explain why it's far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a "side hustle," a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.