Hobbies? Who is She?
I am very good at setting the next goal.
Finish the degree. Get the promotion. Hit the target. Immediately look for another one. My brain treats life like a checklist, and for some reason, it refuses to include a “pause and acknowledge progress” box.
What I am not as good at is stopping long enough to notice what I have already accomplished.
Achievements blur together when you live in constant forward motion. The moment something you have been working toward happens, it becomes the new normal. What once felt impressive quietly becomes the baseline, and the bar moves again without asking for consent.
I do not think this comes from a lack of gratitude. I think it comes from where I spend my energy.
School and career demand structure, focus, and constant problem-solving. They reward momentum. So that is where most of my intentional energy goes. By the time I get home, I am tapped out. Not in a dramatic way — just in the “my brain has left the chat” kind of way.
That is usually when the personal things get postponed.
The hot Pilates class I have been saying I want to try for months.
The cruise I keep talking about planning with friends.
The hobbies that exist purely for enjoyment and have absolutely no productivity value.
They stay on the list, right under “respond to that text” and right above “become a morning person.” Very aspirational. Very untouched.
Instead, my evenings fill up with doomscrolling and watching Friends. Not because that is what I truly want to do, but because they ask nothing from me. After spending all day being disciplined and ambitious, low-effort entertainment feels earned — even if it is not exactly fulfilling.
There is a quiet cost to this.
Not only do achievements pass by without being acknowledged, but the parts of life that are meant to be lived, not achieved, get delayed indefinitely. The things that do not improve a résumé are the easiest to neglect, even when they are the ones that would actually make life feel fuller.
If I am being honest, I have been more aware of this pattern than I have been successful at changing it.
I still spend most of my energy on school and work. I still come home tired and default to scrolling or watching TV. The Pilates class is still on my list. The cruise is still to be booked. At this point, the Pilates studio and Royal Caribbean are both waiting on a version of me that has not left the Amazon parking lot yet.
Most days, I am better at noticing what I am postponing than I am at actually starting. I have fully mastered the phrase “next week,” even though we all know how that usually goes.
I do not have a clean lesson yet. I just know that I do not want to keep moving so fast that my life only exists in future plans and past achievements.
So for now, I am sitting with the question instead of the answer: What would it look like to give my personal life the same intention I give my other goals?
So how do you do it?
How do you go from liking the post to actually showing up?
