In defense of doing absolutely pointless things for the sake of your creativity, sanity, and humanity.
I’m a doctor!
Well, kinda.
I got a Doctorate in Divinity…from the Universal Life Church. The first part sounds rather impressive until you get to the second part and discover that the rigorous academic journey involved significantly less intellectual suffering. There was no dissertation, no years of theological study, and certainly no great spiritual awakening.
I got it because I found out I could, and the idea of being able to call myself a doctor made me smirk. And that’s it. That’s the entire story of my bullshit achievement. I did it for my own amusement, because somewhere in my brain, the idea of having a doctorate, in anything, for absolutely no good reason, that I didn’t earn, was absolutely hilarious. And, every once in a while, I look up at the carefully framed and matted diploma on my office wall (which cost more than the degree!), remember that I have it, and I laugh all over again.
It’s probably one of the least productive things I’ve ever spent money on. And I love it. It actually kinda makes me feel alive, which got me thinking about something that might be worth discussing: What if doing things for no good reason is actually a very good reason to do them?
What if, despite being unproductive and ridiculous, it makes us more human?
The Business of Being Human
We’ve become remarkably good at turning nearly everything we do into something we’re supposed to get something out of, meaning we can’t just be bored without getting something out of it, or we should be full of shame and publicly ridiculed. Even relaxation has become a mindfulness and productivity strategy – a life hack – as if the only legitimate reason to take a vacation is to return to work better equipped to do more work.
We can’t just go for a walk anymore; we have to get our steps in. We can’t simply read something interesting; we have to join a bookclub and turn it into proof we’re not dumb. We can’t enjoy a hobby; we have to monetize it as a side hustle.
And if you’re in a creative profession, lord help you (that phrase means something different now that I’m a God Doctor!), because you’re expected to turn practically everything you encounter into inspiration for something else. Every interesting conversation, strange observation, and unusual experience is suddenly potential content, just like this stupid article. Every input has to be an output. We’re all walking around collecting raw materials for the next thing we’re supposed to produce so we sound profound and not entirely bland and useless.
We’ve become so obsessed with finding value in everything that we’ve forgotten the value of doing something for nothing.
Somewhere along the way, we began treating the absence of a measurable outcome as evidence that an activity wasn’t particularly worthwhile, and while that makes sense when you’re running a business, it becomes a little more troubling when you start applying the same thinking to your soul, because not everything that gives life meaning needs to justify its existence.
The Psychology of Doing Things for the Hell of It
Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci have spent decades studying human motivation through something called Self-Determination Theory – something we seem to have lost or forgotten. At its core is the idea that people aren’t motivated exclusively by rewards, recognition, money, or external expectations. We also apparently possess an inherent desire to explore, learn, experiment, and engage in activities simply because we find them enjoyable. We like to live life, not just survive it. I think all the bullshit we watch just makes us forget that.
It’s called intrinsic motivation.
When we do something because we genuinely want to, the experience itself becomes the reward. We don’t need somebody to congratulate us, approve of our behavior, watch or read out content, or explain how it contributes to our long-term objectives. We engage because something inside us says, “Well damn, that looks interesting.”
Or, in my case, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if I bought a doctorate online?”
Self-Determination Theory also identifies autonomy as one of our fundamental psychological needs. We want to feel that our actions belong to us, that we’re participating in our own lives rather than simply responding to the expectations of everyone around us.
There’s a special kind of freedom in doing something that doesn’t need to be explained, defended, or justified. Nobody has to understand why you enjoy it, and nobody gets to determine whether the experience was worth having. You just get to experience something and let it be all yours.
That’s part of what makes “play” so interesting. When we’re genuinely playing, we’re not necessarily pursuing a prescribed outcome. We’re experimenting with possibilities because the experience itself is enjoyable. We invent rules, break them, follow strange impulses, and allow our minds to wonder and wander into places that practicality might otherwise discourage.
And the more we insist that play must serve some productive purpose, the more we risk changing the nature of the experience altogether.
Imagine telling a child that building a fort out of couch cushions is a wonderful way to develop spatial reasoning, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. The child doesn’t give a damn about any of that! You suck as a parent. They’re building a fort because, for the next twenty minutes, the living room is a castle, the floor’s lava, and there’s a goddamn dragon coming! Get out of here with your self-help-book parenting!
The magic of life is in the experience, not the outcome – the journey, not the destination, as they say.
And we adults could use a little reminder of that more often.
Creativity Lives in the Cracks
I’ve long believed that creativity often happens in the cracks of life, those strange, neglected spaces between the things we’re supposed to be doing and saying. It’s in the places where our attention wanders because something catches it, and our imagination decides to follow, and we discover something new, odd, interesting down in there.
Sometimes those cracks lead to extraordinary discoveries. Other times, they lead absolutely nowhere. The interesting part is that we rarely know which is which when we begin, and that’s ok. That’s what makes exploration so different from execution. Execution begins with a destination and works toward reaching it. Exploration begins with an impulse and drive, and allows the destination to reveal itself, assuming there even is one. And there’s an argument to be made about the wonders of being lost, figuratively and literally.
In my professional life, I’ve seen how easily creativity can become trapped by the very systems designed to make it productive. We establish objectives, define deliverables, assign timelines, and create processes to move efficiently from problem to solution. All necessary things, particularly when clients are paying us to solve complicated problems as quickly and cheaply as possible. But when every creative effort must immediately demonstrate its usefulness, we begin eliminating the strange detours that might have taken us somewhere entirely unexpected.
We become excellent at arriving where we intended to go, but increasingly uncomfortable discovering somewhere we never thought to look, and I worry that this mindset follows us home. After all, there’s a damn clock ticking in our project management software! Just stay on the path – the straight and narrow – and we’ll get to where we need to be, supposedly. Fall in line, don’t waver, don’t overthink it – we only have so many hours!
The pressure from the world around us builds and builds so we happily drift into becoming machines, and we start judging our own interests by their usefulness, our free time by its productivity, and our personal pursuits by whether they contribute to some larger ambition. Even curiosity starts needing permission from practicality. But creativity isn’t limited to the moments when we’re deliberately trying to be creative. It develops through the strange accumulation of experiences, connections, curiosities, emotions, and observations that make each of us uniquely ourselves. Much of that happens outside of any formal creative process, often when we’re following something that has absolutely no business being useful.
I don’t believe every pointless activity secretly contains some brilliant idea waiting to emerge. That’s just another way of demanding a return on the investment.
I believe the more interesting possibility is that people who give themselves permission to pursue things simply because they enjoy them may also be giving their imaginations permission to exist without constant supervision.
Sometimes a ridiculous idea is just a ridiculous idea, and sometimes that’s exactly what makes it ridiculously wonderful.
The Problem With Making Play Productive
There’s a tempting argument I could make here about how leaders should encourage more play, how businesses can build cultures of curiosity, and how allowing employees to pursue unusual interests might unlock greater innovation.
Those arguments have merit. I’ve certainly made versions of them myself, but there’s also something a little ridiculous about telling people they should have more fun because it might make them better employees, or more creative humans.
We’ve managed to take one of the most natural human experiences and turn it into another professional responsibility. Now we’re supposed to be playful, not because play feels good, but because studies suggest it might improve our creative output.
Congratulations. We’ve invented performance-based fun, ya bums!
The same thing happens when companies try to manufacture spontaneity through scheduled brainstorming sessions, mandatory team-building exercises, Post-it note parties, or carefully orchestrated opportunities for employees to “think outside the box.” (eww) There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating environments where people can explore ideas together, but spontaneous curiosity becomes something rather different when everybody has to show up at 2:30 and report their brilliant ideas by 3:30.
Real play requires a certain freedom from expectation. It needs room to be unproductive, embarrassing, silly, and occasionally completely stupid. And sometimes it needs to happen without an audience.
Especially without an audience!
That’s something I’ve been thinking about more lately. We’re living in a culture where so much of our personal experience is performed for public consumption. We still, for some reason, record and stream our experiences instead of experiencing them and broadcast little pieces of ourselves to mysterious audiences we’ve gradually assembled around ourselves without ever really knowing them. There’s joy in sharing things, of course. But there’s also something deeply satisfying about having an experience that belongs entirely to you. Something you don’t need to photograph, publish, or turn into a stupid story.
Something that simply makes you happy.
My doctorate was one of those things. Ironically, I know, I know, I’m now writing an entire article about it, which makes me a huge friggin’ hypocrite, but I promise I didn’t purchase it with a content strategy in mind.
There’s a difference, though, between doing something for yourself and doing it alone. My colleague and fellow idiot Jon Feld got his doctorate with me, because apparently one idiot with an utterly useless credential wasn’t enough around here. There’s something wonderful about having a partner in play – someone who sees the same absurdity you do, never judges, and happily goes along with something that makes absolutely no sense, especially when everyone is shaking their heads at us. It’s not about having an audience, or someone to impress, or even someone who approves of what you’re doing. It’s about having someone who’s in on the joke, who finds the same strange joy in the ridiculous, and who makes the whole experience that much more wonderfully stupid.
As Jon puts it: “Most of the time, my weird humor falls flat. A partner in idiocy will acknowledge how shitty a joke is, but encourage me to keep doing it anyhow. Because the stuff that does land makes me happy. I just have to make sense to me — or James — and I’m satisfied. And, when we’re occupying that stupid space, it’s that much more special because it’s limited to two morons who truly appreciate (and tolerate) each other’s weird.”
A Little More Soul, a Little Less Purpose
I’m not suggesting we abandon ambition, stop pursuing meaningful goals, rely on the opinions of only the closest idiots, or spend our professional lives chasing every ridiculous impulse that wanders into our heads. We need purpose, discipline, and direction. I’m responsible for helping run a business, and I know how important those things are, but I also think we sometimes forget that the point of living isn’t simply to become more effective at living.
There’s an entire world of experiences that don’t need to advance our careers, improve our reputations, make us smarter, or contribute to something greater than themselves. They can exist purely because they bring us happiness, satisfaction, amusement, or that peculiar little feeling of delight we get when something tickles a part of our imagination nobody else knows exists, and perhaps that’s something worth protecting. Not because it’ll make us better leaders, more original thinkers, or more successful creative professionals, although it certainly might influence how we see the world, but because there’s something fundamentally human about pursuing something for no other reason than the fact that it makes us feel alive.
There’s a difference between having a purpose and demanding that everything have one. So, yes, I have a doctorate in divinity. It’s honorary, unaccredited, and entirely useless for practicing medicine, discussing theology with any real authority, or improving my professional qualifications. I learned absolutely nothing while acquiring it, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise, but sometimes, when I’m having a particularly difficult day, I’ll remember that somewhere in this ridiculous world, there’s a piece of paper that says I’m Dr. James Dowd, and it is knowingly meaningless and stupid, and arguably not appropriate.
And I’ll smirk.
That’s my entire return on investment, and I couldn’t be happier with it.
So I’ll leave you with a question, and I’d encourage you to resist the urge to turn your answer into a personal development exercise, creative strategy, or productivity hack: When was the last time you did something for absolutely no reason other than the fact that you wanted to?
And if you can’t remember, perhaps it’s time to do something wonderfully stupid.
For your own damn soul.
Sincerely,
Dr. James Dowd