you should be joymaxxing your projects
When I'm working on a passion project (or anything, really), I tend to be obsessively serious in ways that stress me out. Something I initially wanted to do becomes a thing I have to do. I've subconsciously cultivated this behavior, as I only ever notice it late: tired, tense, wondering why something I chose to do feels like something I owe, in a sense.
I'm not always caught up on social media jargon, but I'm interested in the —maxxing suffix I've seen circulating online. I liked the shamelessness of it, the idea you can just decide to maximize something (good), as aggressively and deliberately as you want. Joymaxxing, specifically: making happiness non-negotiable, not a reward for finishing a task but a condition maintained throughout the process. It's why my current goal, when working on something, is prioritizing fun.
The older I get, the more I feel permission to play. In practice, this looks different for everyone: working from a cafe instead of my desk, reading something adjacent to the project just for the pleasure of it, and following interesting tangents. All of these things alters the texture of the work in unexpectedly nice ways, because it reminds me that I'm a human being doing the thing, not a machine producing it.
The shift isn't from serious to unserious. I still passionately care about my projects as I always do. However, I stopped treating "enjoyment" as a threat to "quality," like if I was having too much fun, I'll generate something mediocre or straight up horrendous. Looking back at it, perhaps the work I'm most proud of, is the work I've enjoyed doing the most.