The copper taste of blood is still blooming on the left side of my tongue because I was too impatient with a sourdough crust earlier, and honestly, it fits the mood of this conversation perfectly. I am currently staring at a screen filled with 82 different troop placements, my mind whirring through the logistics of a defensive perimeter, when a notification pings. It is my friend, a person I have known for 12 years, asking if I am finally ‘taking this seriously.’ By which he means, am I streaming my gameplay to a tiny audience for 42 cents an hour or entering some bracketed tournament with a cash prize that wouldn’t even cover a decent dinner for 2. The assumption is biting. The implication is that if I am not grinding toward a financial or social payout, I am essentially rotting in place.

I’ve been a museum education coordinator for 32 months now, and my entire professional existence is dedicated to the preservation of things that have no current ‘utility’ in the capitalist sense. We keep 1002 artifacts in the basement that will likely never be sold or used to power a machine, yet we recognize their inherent right to exist. Why don’t we grant ourselves that same grace? I find myself holding my breath, the dull ache in my tongue a reminder of my own clumsy humanity, as I try to explain that I am playing this game because I enjoy the friction of the strategy. Not because I want to be the best in the world. Not because I want to ‘monetize my passion.’ Just because the 62 minutes I spend here are the only minutes of my day that belong entirely to me and not to my resume.

We have entered a strange, parasitic era where the ‘side hustle’ has become a moral imperative. If you draw, you should have an online shop. If you garden, you should be a lifestyle influencer. If you play strategy games, you should be a ‘content creator.’ It is a tragedy of the highest order-the death of the unprofitable hobby. We are being coached to view our leisure time as ‘raw material’ that must be refined into ‘output.’ I see this even in the museum. We get 222 visitors on a slow Tuesday, and half of them are more concerned with finding the perfect angle for a photo that proves they were ‘cultured’ than they are with actually looking at the 12th-century tapestry in front of them. The experience is secondary to the evidence of the experience.

I’m not immune to it. Yesterday, I spent 52 minutes trying to figure out how to optimize my LinkedIn profile to better reflect my ‘leadership in the arts sector,’ even though I actually spent that morning helping 12 schoolchildren understand why an ancient clay pot matters. I felt guilty for the ‘wasted’ time with the kids because it didn’t generate a metric I could show my board of directors. That guilt is a poison. It’s the same guilt that makes me hesitate before opening a game at the end of a long shift. I catch myself thinking, ‘I could be learning a new language or researching 72 different ways to improve museum accessibility.’ But the brain isn’t a hard drive that needs constant defragmenting; it’s an organ that needs to rest, to wander, and to engage in bounded, responsible play without the pressure of a ROI.

There is a specific kind of peace found in systems that don’t demand your soul. I remember talking to 2 colleagues about this during a break. One of them, who is 62 years old and far wiser than I am, told me that her favorite thing to do is to knit scarves that she intentionally unravels at the end of the night. She does it for the rhythm, for the tactile sensation, for the 82 rows of stitches that go nowhere. It is a radical act of rebellion against a world that demands a finished product for every minute of effort. I’m not quite at the ‘unraveling scarves’ level of enlightenment yet, but I am learning to protect my digital spaces. I look for environments where the game is the point, not the platform for something else.

I found myself drifting back to a digital space that didn’t demand I become a professional athlete of the screen. I was just there to think. In that quiet corner of the internet, I found that Tangkasnet provided exactly what was missing: a structure for play that wasn’t trying to colonize my future career. It offered a return to the fundamentals of the hobby-a place where the stakes are contained, the strategy is the focus, and the reward is the mental engagement itself rather than a vanity metric. It felt like walking into one of the smaller, quieter galleries in my museum, away from the 122 people taking selfies with the ‘famous’ paintings, where you can finally breathe and just look at the art for what it is.

The Cost of Optimization

This obsession with optimization has convinced us that doing something purely for the joy of strategy is a waste. We have been lied to. A waste of time is a concept invented by people who want to sell you a time-management app. If you are enjoying yourself, if you are stretching your mind across 32 different tactical possibilities, if you are finding a moment of flow, that time is the most ‘productive’ time of your life because it is actually being lived. It is not being ‘spent’ or ‘invested’-it is being experienced.

I think back to my friend’s question about Twitch. I didn’t answer him right away. Instead, I waited 22 minutes, finished my current round, and then told him that my ‘stats’ were none of his business. He laughed, probably thinking I was just being defensive because I’m not ‘elite.’ And maybe I’m not. I’m definitely not. I made at least 12 mistakes in that last game. But those mistakes were mine. They weren’t part of a brand strategy. They weren’t a ‘fail’ for a highlight reel. They were just 2 or 3 wrong turns in a game that I was playing for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it.

My tongue still hurts, a sharp little sting every time I swallow, but it’s a grounding sensation. It reminds me that I have a body, and that body exists in a physical world that is messy and unoptimized. My museum basement has 42 boxes of pottery shards that will never be reassembled. They are broken, they are ‘useless,’ and they are beautiful. They tell a story of a person who sat at a wheel 2002 years ago and made something because they needed a vessel, or perhaps because they just liked the feeling of wet clay between their fingers. I doubt they were worrying about whether their pottery was ‘disrupting the industry’ or if they could ‘scale their craft.’

We need to reclaim the unprofitable hobby. We need to play games that nobody will ever see us play. We need to read books that won’t make us smarter, just happier. We need to engage in strategy for the sake of the puzzle, not the prize. When everything moment of existence must be monetized, we aren’t really living; we are just operating. And I, for one, would rather be a person with a bitten tongue and a 42% win rate in a game nobody cares about than a perfectly optimized machine with no internal life left to protect.

I think about the 12th-century tapestry again. It took years to make. Thousands of hours. If the weavers had been worried about ‘efficiency,’ they would have made something simpler, something faster, something that ‘scaled.’ Instead, they made something that has lasted for 812 years because it was worth doing well, regardless of the cost. Our hobbies are the tapestries of our daily lives. They don’t need to be sold. They just need to be woven. If we keep treating our leisure as a resource to be mined, we will eventually run out of the very curiosity that makes us human in the first place. I’ll keep my strategy games, and I’ll keep my losses, and I’ll keep my quiet corners like the one I found earlier, because at the end of the day, my 92 minutes of ‘unproductive’ time are the only thing keeping my 102% effort at work from turning me into stone. Why should I feel guilty for that? The guilt is the only thing that needs to be deleted.