Last updated: June 24, 2023

A short while ago, I walked the entire way from my house to the CN Tower (in downtown Toronto). Now for those that don’t know where I live, that’s about a forty kilometer walk, a similar distance to a marathon. And while Eliud Kipchoge can do that in 2 hours, for me it was a whole day’s worth of walking.

What did I do after my “monumental” achievement? Took the bus right back to where I started.

But didn’t you just undo 9 hours worth of progress? Why couldn’t you just have taken the bus downtown and saved the effort?

Why why why?

Most things we do in life have a goal in mind. Some are reactive in nature. We eat food because we are hungry. We cry because we are hurt. Some are proactive in nature. We go to school to earn an education that will help us build a future career.

But whatever we do, it seems like others always want a justifier for why we do it. And for some activities, all we can come up with is “why not?” — leaving the listener unamused and unsatisfied. This is usually seen as a childish response due to the person trying to avoid justifying their actions or being unaware of underlying factors affecting their decisions, but there are those rare moments when something is done purely due to intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation does not rely on external achievement as a motivating factor. The point of such an activity is not about getting attention, material goods, or even delayed gratification. No one really cared that I went on such a walk. My legs felt like they could have done without it, and in the long term, this would just be a distant memory concerning the last few days of high school.

If one does not care about the future implications, nor does anything from the past give a reason for the activity to be conceived, it is implied that intrinsic motivation is what needs to happen for one to live in the present, without worry and concern.

Thus brings up a reduced focus on whether or not the present self is better than one’s past self, or if one is not planning enough ahead for the future. Self-improvement is not linear in nature, and there are times when the present version of yourself is indeed a worse version of your past. But when one lives in the present they are able to continuously reset their preconceived notions of themselves and present a clean slate, tabula rasa, which is willing to take on new challenges and change.

Do things for the sake of doing them.