We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said 'I… - Oliver Burkeman

The more efficient you get, the more you become "a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations," in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.

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.

The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it "dealt with," there's usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we're facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn't have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive.