Social media taught us that our worth is measured in numbers. Likes, followers, views, engagement. We chase trends not because we enjoy them, but because we’re afraid of being left behind. We upgrade our phones even when the old ones work perfectly fine. We turn hobbies into side hustles before we’ve even learned to enjoy them. We got burnt out even before we learned how to enjoy something thoroughly.

Somewhere along the line, we lost permission to have fun for ourselves. Playing guitar alone becomes pointless unless the world can see it. Enjoying a game or reading a book in solitude feels insufficient without sharing a review about it. Even creativity is repackaged as content to be harvested.

How often do you hear someone say, “You should make content out of this?” Everything becomes content. Everything becomes a performance. And in that performance, we lose something essential: the simple joy of doing things for their own sake.

Full article: https://www.thetinywisdom.com/the-slow-decline-of-joy