The journey matters more than the destination
What defines our personality
🏷️ Categories: Happiness, Love, Time, Life lessons.
(...)
Always keep Ithaca in your mind, to arrive there is your destiny, but never hurry the journey, better that it lasts many years and dock, old man, on the island of Ithaca, enriched with what you have gained on the road, without waiting for Ithaca to enrich you.
Ithaca gave you such a beautiful journey, without it you would not have taken the road.
(...)
— Excerpt from the poem of the voyage to Ithaca, by Konstantino Kavafis, 1911.
These lines from the poem “Ithaca” by the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis summarize an idea that, in our age of speed and productivity, seems to have been forgotten...
The journey matters more than the destination.
We are obsessed with what is efficient, what is numerical, what can be compared and made profitable. We get used to valuing things according to their usefulness. But what about everything that cannot be translated into figures or profits? Are art, happiness, friendship or love “useless” because they have no further purpose?
In fact, something very curious happens...
To be useful is almost an insult, it implies to be worth only as an instrument to achieve something else.
The reality is this: the most useless thing is what gives the most meaning to our lives.
The usefulness of the useless
Productivity is celebrated, as if everything should have a purpose or objective.
For example, education is no longer seen as intellectual growth, but as a tool to “be more employable in the future”. Universities are no longer centers of knowledge, they are factories of workers, and students are clients who do a procedure called “studying” to receive a degree in return.
That is why many complain about careers with no outlets, because they only think of utility.
In studying to earn money with it.
Studying literature, philosophy or history seems a waste of time.
Why read Cervantes or Shakespeare if it doesn't improve your CV?
Why study philosophy if it doesn't guarantee you a good job?
However, what is not immediately profitable is often what we love the most and fills our existence with meaning. No one “needs” poetry, painting, literature or music to survive, but without them, what kind of life would we be leading?
An apathetic life, because the most useless thing is what makes us happiest.
The useless gives meaning to life
The philosopher Bertrand Russel once told a very curious personal story.
In his essay In Praise of Idleness (1935), he said that one day he discovered that peaches came from the Far East. It all began when King Kanishka found peach pits in the bags of Chinese prisoners, who, after passing through India, carried the fruit to Persia and then hand in hand to Europe.
Since he learned this, he liked peaches more.
Knowledge, even if it is something that is of no "use" to us, enriches us.
It connects us with history, with the world, with other human beings. Culture, art, love, all that which has no practical objective, is what really builds societies richer in values and humanity.
But we live in a world where "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is seen as nonsense.
A waste of time...
Because I love it
If everything is measured by utility, doing something "for the love of art" is an act of madness.
Why do we write poems? Why do we play instruments? Why do we paint if we know that no one will pay us for it?
It's simple: Because there is great satisfaction in doing it and we seek nothing more.
We don't paint pictures to sell them, we do it to enjoy the process.
We don't write books to sell them, we do it to enjoy the process.
We don't love someone to be useful in our purposes; we love because loving is in itself the meaning of life.
We don't cultivate friendships for personal gain, we do it because we enjoy sharing our time with those people.
Money, fame, utility and everything else should be a consequence of doing something we love madly, not a goal.
I think of skaters, who spend hours jumping at the risk of breaking a leg just for a few seconds of glory when they succeed in the trick they were trying. Or surfers, who spend hours trying to ride the best wave for as long as possible.
And all that effort for what? What's the point of devoting so much energy to something useless?
For the sake of it, because doing so is rewarding. Nothing more.
What you do in your free time tells who you really are, not your “productive” hours. As I told a good friend of mine one day while we were out walking, “You know you love something when you would do it even if you had to pay for it.”
And it’s true.
Art, love, friendship, and all our passions remind us that life is not a race to a goal, it is a journey of exploration. We don’t live to produce; we produce to live. And living means learning, loving, playing, and creating. None of that has to be useful, and yet it is what we enjoy most in the end.
On the journey to Ithaca, it is more important to enjoy the journey than to get to Ithaca.
✍️ Your turn: What things do you do for fun that define you?
💭 Quote of the day: A quote from someone who has already appeared in Mental Garden and who knew this very well: «Physics is like sex. It can clearly have practical results, but we don't do it for that reason.» — Richard Feynman
See you soon, hugs! 👋
References 📚
Russell, B. (1935). In Praise of Idleness. En Routledge. URL
Excellent advice here. Thanks.