The Strange Comfort of Being Bad at Something

Not everything needs to become a skill.

You try pottery once.

The first thing you make looks less like a bowl and more like something that could have been excavated from a very disappointing archaeological site.

But instead of laughing and moving on, you find yourself watching a YouTube tutorial called “5 POTTERY MISTAKES BEGINNERS MAKE.”

You start running, and over the weekend you're researching shoes, macros, and heart-rate zones.

You pick up a guitar…three YouTube videos later, you're considering whether you should “take this seriously.”

We don't seem to know how to just do something badly for fun. 

There was a time when a hobby could simply be something you enjoyed. Now everything needs an outcome. 

Reading? You should read 30 books a year. 

Photography? Build a portfolio. 

Knitting? Open an Etsy store. 

Even resting somehow needs to improve your mental health.  

Can we please do something useless?  

Being bad at something can actually be freeing 

You can paint something terrible, and nobody expects a masterpiece. You can sing while cooking even though Spotify would like you to stop. There's something wonderfully liberating about doing something where nobody is keeping score. 

Kids Never Got the Memo

Kids are naturally terrible at things. They draw weird people with enormous heads. They dance without rhythm. They make terrible crafts and proudly show everyone.

They aren't thinking: “Could this become a side hustle?” They just think: “Look what I made.”

Somewhere along the way, we started caring about whether we're good before allowing ourselves to enjoy something. We compare, measure, and evaluate ourselves before we've even had a chance to figure out whether we like the thing.

Maybe we could take a little advice from the kid who spent twenty minutes drawing a purple elephant and genuinely believed it was excellent.

You Don't Have to Become “A Person Who…” 

Sometimes you can just do something because you saw it and thought, “Wait, that looks kinda fun.”

You can make a questionable cake, learn three chords on a guitar, and then abandon the guitar like it personally betrayed you. You can buy watercolours because the colours were pretty and produce something that looks like a weather map. You can try pottery and come home with an object that raises several questions.

And that's fine. Because not everything needs to have a character arc.

We're already expected to be good at so many things. Work. Relationships. Communication. Money. Cooking. Replying to messages in a socially acceptable timeframe. Remembering passwords.

Can we have one thing where we're just absolutely sh*t and having a lovely time?

Maybe that's the point. You can simply be bad at something.

Beautifully. Pointlessly. Recreationally bad.

Try calligraphy and discover your handwriting was already fighting for its life. Try learning a language, remember exactly three words, and have Duolingo personally disappointed in you.

And if someone asks whether you're getting good at it?

No ❤️

I'm having fun.

See you somewhere between trying and absolutely winging it,

Keerthanaa

Founder, kwurk