On outcomes, obligations, and letting joy matter before it proves anything
There is a funny problem with researching unproductive joy. The more I think about joy, play, creativity, curiosity, connection, and rest, the easier it is to find reasons they might be good for us. Play can teach us things. Creativity can help us think differently. Connection can support us when life is hard. Rest can affect how we feel and function. A hobby can help us develop skills, meet people, discover parts of ourselves, or simply make a difficult season a little more bearable. I know this personally, too. Joy has mattered enormously in my own life, sometimes in ways that feel much bigger than the word joy seems capable of holding.
So I keep running into a strange question: If unproductive joy produces something valuable, is it still unproductive?
I think it is. But the reason why has become one of the questions at the center of this whole experiment.
We are very good at giving joy a job.
Think about the ways we talk about doing things we enjoy. Take up a hobby because it reduces stress. Play because it helps children develop. Make art because creativity is good for your brain. Go outside because nature improves your well-being. Spend time with people you love because social connection is important for your health. Rest so you can recharge. Take a vacation so you can come back refreshed and ready to work.
And, of course, if you become particularly good at making something, someone will eventually tell you, You should sell those.
None of those outcomes is necessarily bad. Some of them are wonderful, and some of them may be deeply important. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. What I’m becoming curious about is what happens when the outcome quietly becomes the justification for the experience. When did this feels good stop being enough? Why does pleasure so often seem to need a supporting argument?
Outcome is not the same thing as obligation.
This is a distinction I keep coming back to as I build the Unproductive Joy Factory: an experience can produce an outcome without owing us one.
Maybe you spend an afternoon painting something because you want to paint. You might feel calmer afterward. You might learn a new technique, make something beautiful, or discover that you’re actually quite good at it. Maybe somebody sees what you made and asks to buy it. Maybe painting becomes an important part of how you care for yourself. Maybe you eventually start a whole tiny painting empire and become inexplicably wealthy selling portraits of frogs wearing Victorian clothing.
Fantastic.
None of that retroactively means the afternoon needed to produce those things in order to have been worth your time. You were allowed to paint because you wanted to paint. The outcome can be real without becoming the obligation.
That distinction feels increasingly important to me.
Intrinsic value and instrumental value
There is language for some of what I’m circling here that already exists across philosophy, psychology, leisure studies, play scholarship, and other fields, and part of my research is figuring out where the idea of unproductive joy sits in relation to that existing work. One distinction I’m particularly interested in is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value.
Very simply, instrumental value asks what something helps us get. We do A because it produces B. Intrinsic value asks whether something can be worthwhile in itself, without needing another destination to justify the experience. I’m interested in what happens when we apply that distinction to joy because so much of our cultural language about joy seems surprisingly instrumental.
We don’t only rest. We rest so we can be productive tomorrow. We don’t only play. We play because it develops useful capacities. We don’t only make things. We make things and then wonder whether we should sell them. Even joy can start to feel as though it needs a résumé.
The outcome can still matter.
I want to be careful here because I don’t think the answer is pretending outcomes don’t exist. They do, and I want to know about them. If something I love doing supports my mental health, that matters to me. If play helps people connect, that’s worth understanding. If creative activity changes how people learn, lead, relate, recover, imagine, or participate, I want researchers to study it. The Unproductive Joy Factory is, after all, partly a research project. It would be pretty strange for me to become annoyed every time the research discovered something useful.
What I’m questioning is the order of operations.
There is a difference between saying, “This produces a beneficial outcome, therefore it is worth doing,” and saying, “This is worth experiencing, and something beneficial may also happen.” Those ideas can look almost identical from the outside, but I think they can feel profoundly different from the inside.
The first makes the outcome part of the justification. The second lets the experience have value before we know what, if anything, it will produce.
Because usefulness can become a requirement.
Once something has to be useful, we can start measuring whether we’re doing it well enough. Did I relax enough? Did this hobby improve my mental health? Am I getting better? Did I finish anything? Was this worth the money? Could I sell this? Should I post it? Did I use my free time wisely?
I have managed to turn things I genuinely enjoy into performance reviews with alarming efficiency. I suspect I am not alone.
That is part of why I’m interested in creating a little protected territory where the answer to What did you get out of that? is allowed to be I liked it. Or nothing, really. Or even I don’t know. I don’t want the inability to identify a measurable benefit to become evidence that the time was wasted.
Unproductive doesn’t mean nothing happens.
This is where the word unproductive matters to me. I’m not using it to mean useless, meaningless, frivolous, or empty, and I’m definitely not promising that nothing productive will ever emerge from these experiences. Quite the opposite. Something might happen. You might laugh, make something, learn something, connect with somebody, rest, have an idea, feel better, become better at something, or even become more productive afterward.
Fine.
But you don’t owe the experience any of those outcomes.
That’s the distinction I’m exploring. Unproductive joy doesn’t require the absence of outcomes. It requires the absence of required outcomes. Something can emerge from an experience without becoming the reason the experience deserved to exist in the first place.
Which brings me back to the Factory.
This question applies to the Unproductive Joy Factory itself in a way that makes me laugh because, yes, I am building a business around the idea that not everything needs to be productive. Obviously, I would like the business to succeed. I would like people to buy things. I would like the research to reach people. I would like the Factory to create opportunities, relationships, collaborations, conversations, and enough revenue to keep existing. I am not pretending otherwise, and capitalism remains stubbornly committed to requiring me to pay my bills.
What I’m experimenting with is whether I can let those things be hopes without turning them into conditions for whether this was worth doing.
Right now, I get to research something that fascinates me. I get to make things, follow questions, play with tiny objects, build strange little boxes, talk to people about joy, and see where all of this goes. If the only way I can justify having done any of that is by proving later that it was sufficiently successful, then I have recreated the exact system I’m trying to examine.
So I’m trying something else. I can want an outcome without requiring one. I can work toward something without making its achievement the sole measure of whether the experience mattered. I can care deeply about what happens next while still allowing what is happening now to have value.
Maybe that distinction will hold up. Maybe my research will complicate it. I actually hope it does, because that’s part of the experiment. I’m not building the Unproductive Joy Factory because I’ve figured all of this out. I’m building it in part because I haven’t.
For now, this is where I’m standing:
Joy is allowed to have consequences. It just doesn’t need a job.
No skill required. No outcome expected. Anything else is extra.