So you’ve clicked on a post that seems to promise you something. In this case, the promise is that writing can somehow improve your climbing experience. I wonder what goes through your head when you click a title like that. Perhaps your mind darts to a listicle of tips and tricks that will somehow augment the boring, ordinary experience you might think you’re currently having. Or perhaps you’re already imagining harvesting some quick tidbits of knowledge that will lead you to write better Instagram captions, which means more followers, which maybe somehow means more status, freedom, money, opportunity.

This article isn’t about any of these things. In fact, this article is actually about stopping ourselves from thinking in these opportunistic and materialistic terms, and being open to doing silly and meaningless things for their own sake.

Things like climbing rocks. And perhaps even writing about those experiences.

Today we live in an achievement culture. And what I mean by that, is that we, as individuals, feel like it is our job, and a sign of our worth and value as human beings, to be endlessly working on ourselves and maximizing our abilities.

All of us are our own little personal projects that we’re obsessed with.

This explains our obsession with productivity, fitness, with counting the number of books we read in a year, the number words we write every day, the number of followers we have on social media, the number of pitches we climb ….