Today is one of those days where nothing is wrong, nothing is particularly urgent, and I am actually enjoying my work, yet my mind feels strangely light and unwilling to stay in one place for too long.

I keep finding myself looking at the mountains and wondering how I have still not grown tired of them. Most things lose their charm with time. People move to beautiful places and eventually stop noticing them. Yet I still find myself staring out of the window in the middle of the day, completely distracted by something that has been there long before me and will probably remain long after I am gone.

I keep thinking about how much of human life is spent solving the same basic problems. Food, shelter, money, security, then a little more money and a little more security just in case the first lot was not enough. And I understand why. We need those things.

Yet I cannot help wondering what people would do if they were not so occupied with survival. Not because I think survival is unimportant, but because once those needs are met, humans seem to immediately start doing things that make very little practical sense.

They write poetry. They make music. They paint. They spend months writing books. They carve statues. They build sandcastles knowing the tide is coming. They sit on mountain tops and stare at sunsets. None of these activities solve survival problem, yet somehow every civilization that has ever existed has found time for them, which is strange.

I was thinking about poets today. I do not particularly enjoy poetry. I appreciate the talent, but poetry often feels like somebody using a handful of beautiful words to express something I have been carrying around for years without being able to properly articulate. Part of me finds that impressive. Another part of me finds it mildly irritating. May be because it feels unfair. May be because they somehow found the words and I did not.

Or perhaps because they turned something messy and impossible into something neat and elegant, while I suspect most thoughts are supposed to remain a little messy.

Maybe that is the theme of today. Not confusion exactly, but an inability to settle on a single conclusion.

I am enjoying work while simultaneously questioning the point of work. I think art is fundamentally pointless and also think the world would be poorer without it. I think humans spend too much time chasing necessities and then remember that necessities are the reason most of us are alive in the first place.

I think most of what we build is temporary, and then I remember that sandcastles are temporary too, yet people keep building them anyway.

Maybe humans have always been doing two things at once. Trying to survive while also trying to create things that have absolutely nothing to do with survival. And for some reason, despite all our intelligence, ambition, and obsession with productivity, I find myself increasingly fascinated by the second part.