the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy. I, for one, don't enjoy perpetually wallowing in mediocrity. The sense of fleeting time go

the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy. I, for one, don't enjoy perpetually wallowing in mediocrity. The sense of fleeting time gone to waste weighs heavily on both the conscious and unconscious of my mind. There's a difference between not having a life's chance at being a competitive athlete but still trying within the best of your means to progress within the sport, and "taking it easy" and treating physical activity solely as occasional recreation. But this article argues for the latter - why? If you're not training for the next marathon, then why are you running in the first place? If you ask me, running the same pace, the same distance, year after year, is a waste of time no matter how much you enjoy it. And this viewpoint leads to slow decrepitude, because if you treat all of your hobbies so casually, you can never improve but only digress. Take physical activity, again, as an example: as you age, as natural hormonal production declines, as wear and tear builds up, that casual run around the block can only ever become more infrequent, more prone to injury, and thus slower and slower until one day you're not running at all. But striving to be the best runner you can be from the get-go, regardless if you have a chance at competitiveness, learning about health and longevity in the sport, will allow you to persevere far longer than the casual merely enjoying themselves on occasion. There's also general consumerism, which this article brings up for me. "Enjoyment", "fun", is largely inherent. It's then easy to say "have fun, enjoy yourself", because that goes without saying. It's far harder to put time and effort into an activity and derive pleasure from it, and the chance for failure is not only higher but more devastating. Develop chronic injury years into your sport of choice? It's over. Don't enjoy the Netflix show you're watching? Turn on another one until you do. Of course most people wouldn't consider watching Netflix a hobby. But that's only because they're at the lowest possible level of mediocrity, because, perhaps, they value cheap ideals of entertainment over all else. In reality, film and television as a medium spans over a century of arts and culture, waiting for you to delve into and master. But if you take this article to heart, you'll instead be content wallowing in the "simple pleasure" of consumption.