Ten years ago, Marcus started taking photographs of abandoned buildings on weekends. He had no goal, no plan to monetize it, no intention of it becoming anything significant. He was a corporate accountant who liked exploring forgotten places and capturing their strange beauty. Just a side quest, something he did because it made him feel alive.
Today, Marcus is a full-time architectural photographer. His work hangs in galleries. His corporate job is a memory he recalls with gratitude rather than regret.
“The thing I did just for fun became the thing that saved me,” he told me. “I wasn’t looking for an escape route. I was just following curiosity. The path appeared because I was willing to explore without needing to know where it would lead.”
Marcus’s story isn’t unique. Research on what psychologists call “intrinsic motivation,” doing something for the inherent satisfaction rather than external reward, suggests that these freely chosen activities often become the foundation for our most meaningful transformations. But not because we planned it that way. Because we followed curiosity long enough for something unexpected to emerge.
Why Goalless Pursuits Hold Hidden Power
We’ve become so goal-oriented that we’ve forgotten how to do things purely for the joy of doing them. Every hobby needs to be productive. Every interest needs to lead somewhere. Every skill needs to be monetizable. And that optimization mindset, while useful in certain contexts, kills something essential: discovery, play, serendipity, joy for its own sake.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three core psychological needs: autonomy (the need to feel in control of your choices), competence (the need to feel capable), and relatedness (the need for connection with others). Side quests, those pursuits we choose freely without external pressure, naturally satisfy all three. You’re choosing the activity because you want to. You’re building competence without anyone grading you. And you often find communities of people who share your obscure interest.
The most transformative things in people’s lives often start as these kinds of side quests: the things they did on weekends, the classes they took out of curiosity, the random interests they followed without knowing why. What makes side quests psychologically powerful isn’t just the activities themselves, but the freedom from performance pressure. No one’s grading you. No one’s paying you. No one’s expectations matter. You can be terrible at it and it’s fine. That freedom creates space for genuine exploration rather than anxious achievement.
How Curiosity Builds a More Dimensional Self
Elena, a lawyer, started a book club with friends. Not for professional development. Not for networking. Just because she loved discussing books. Three years later, that book club had become the center of her social life. The friends from it had become her closest people. Her identity had shifted from “person who works all the time” to “person who prioritizes connection and ideas.”
“The book club didn’t change my career,” she said. “It changed who I am. Which ended up changing everything else.”
When you have pursuits outside your main life, you build what researchers call a “multifaceted identity.” You’re not putting all your identity eggs in one basket. You’re not just your job, your relationship status, your productivity metrics. You’re someone who makes things, learns things, explores things, for no reason other than it matters to you. James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits,” calls this “identity-based change.” When you start thinking of yourself as “someone who paints” rather than “someone trying to learn painting,” the behavior becomes more natural and sustainable because it’s tied to who you are, not just what you do.
The psychological research on identity complexity suggests that people with more identity dimensions tend to be more resilient when one dimension faces challenges. If work is hard, but you’re also a gardener, a musician, a community volunteer, you have other sources of meaning and competence to draw from. Side quests aren’t distractions from your “real” life; they’re essential infrastructure for a more sustainable one.
From Weekend Hobby to Unexpected Path
James, 38, rented a community garden plot on a whim. He started growing tomatoes and herbs on weekends, with no grander vision than wanting something to do with his hands that wasn’t typing. He liked being outside. He liked that code could break but plants just grew.
“It was meditative in a way I didn’t expect,” he told me. “I’d spend Saturday mornings just weeding and transplanting, and my mind would quiet down. I wasn’t thinking about optimization or productivity. I was just being present with something that was alive.”
Two years later, he’d transitioned to working part-time remotely and running a small urban farm education program. The path wasn’t planned; it emerged. “The garden revealed something about what I valued: being outside, teaching people, working with my hands. My coding career had been about what I was good at. The garden showed me what I loved.” This distinction matters. B.J. Fogg’s behavior research at Stanford suggests that we’re more likely to sustain activities that feel good intrinsically rather than those we force through willpower. James’s garden worked because it felt like play, not work. And that playful quality made it sustainable long enough for something unexpected to grow.
When Side Quests Stay Side Quests (And That’s Perfect)
Sarah, 33, took up knitting because her therapist suggested she needed a non-screen hobby. “I was skeptical,” she admitted. “Knitting is for grandmas, I thought. But I needed something to do with my hands while I watched TV. So I tried it.” She didn’t become a knitwear designer or start selling scarves. The knitting stayed a side quest.
“But it gave me something I didn’t know I needed: a way to be present. To make something with my hands. To fail at stitches and laugh about it. To give handmade gifts that people treasure. It didn’t change my career. It changed my relationship with doing things imperfectly.”
This is the part that productivity culture misses. Not every side quest needs to become a business or a career. Some things can just be for joy. The psychological research on what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” suggests that the intrinsic reward of an activity, the absorption, the challenge matched to skill, the loss of self-consciousness, is valuable in itself, regardless of external outcomes. Sarah’s knitting provides regular flow experiences without requiring anything more than the act of doing it.
Protecting Play From the Productivity Trap
Here’s where it gets tricky. You start a side quest. It’s fun. You get decent at it. And then the voice starts: “You should monetize this. You should get serious about this. You should make this productive.” And suddenly your side quest has become another obligation, another thing to optimize, another way you’re failing if you’re not good enough.
Some side quests should stay side quests. You’re allowed to be mediocre at things you love. You don’t have to be great at your hobby; you just have to enjoy it. There’s wisdom in not optimizing everything, in letting some things simply be. The research on “overjustification effect” shows that adding external rewards to intrinsically motivated activities can actually undermine the original motivation. When you start doing something for money that you used to do for love, the love can fade. This doesn’t mean you should never turn a passion into a profession. Marcus, the photographer, did exactly that. But he also emphasized that the decade of doing it “just for love” created a foundation that made it sustainable as a career. “I learned to make images because I loved it, not because I had to. That foundation is everything.” If you do decide to monetize, our guide to side hustles that don’t feel like hustle explores how to maintain joy while earning.
The key is awareness. When an activity stops feeling like play and starts feeling like work, pause. Ask why. Consider whether you want to professionalize it, and what that might cost. And give yourself permission to keep some things purely for joy, even if you could make money from them.
Finding What Calls to You
You don’t have to know what your side quest is yet. You just have to stay open to curiosity. Notice what you find yourself reading about without being assigned to. The articles you click, the videos you watch, the conversations that engage you, these are clues about what genuinely interests you. Consider what you loved as a kid, before pressure to be productive kicked in. What did you do for hours without anyone making you? Maybe there’s something there worth revisiting.
Pay attention to what you envy in others, not their success, but their activities. “I wish I could paint.” “I wish I spoke another language.” “I wish I knew about birds.” These wishes are invitations, not regrets. They’re pointing toward something that matters to you. And ask yourself what you’d try if failure didn’t matter. Because in a side quest, failure genuinely doesn’t matter. That’s the whole point. Being bad at something new is both humbling and liberating in a way that expertise never is. For more on the freedom that comes from learning in public, see our guide to embracing the beginner’s mindset.
Your Invitation
You don’t need to know if this will lead anywhere. You don’t need to be good at it. You don’t need it to be productive. You just need to follow one thread of curiosity and see where it goes.
This weekend, try one thing: take a class in something you know nothing about, check out a library book on a random topic that interests you, visit a place you’ve been curious about, or try making something with your hands. One weekend. One experiment. No commitment beyond “I’m curious.”
See what happens when you honor curiosity without needing it to be useful. Your side quest might just be what you do for fun on weekends. Or it might become the thing that changes your life. Both are valid. Both are valuable. The point isn’t where it leads. The point is that you’re willing to follow it.
What are you curious about? Start there.
Sources: Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan), Atomic Habits (James Clear), Behavior Design Research (B.J. Fogg, Stanford), Flow Theory (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).
