How Joy Gets Killed When It Becomes a To-Do
Because checking off fun isn’t actually fun.
Into Many Things is a space for reimagining life beyond the paycheck (where the rules are optional). Every week, I ask: “What would you do if money wasn’t a thing?” and write about the kind of life that invites asking big questions about life. Because, honestly, why not?
Through personal essays, stories from people I admire, and bite-sized inspiration, I explore how we can live the life we actually want to live, even when it all feels defined by jobs, bills, and routine.
When I wrote about “Why We Avoid the Things That Make Us the Happiest,” last week, I didn’t expect so many of your responses and comments to circle around the same idea: it’s not that we don’t know what brings us joy. It’s that, somewhere along the way, joy itself starts to feel like another task.
I run into this all the time.
For years, I prided myself on my to-do lists. I wrote down everything, and I mean everything: from the big work projects to tiny domestic tasks, down to reminders like “call Mom,” “go for a walk,” or even “take a bath.” Sometimes I’d add something I had already done, just for the dopamine rush of crossing it off.
At first, I loved it. I came of age in the middle of the girl boss era, when turning your life into a system of checklists was marketed as success. You weren’t just working; you were optimizing. Meal prep, productivity hacks, side hustles, self-care Sundays, everything was color-coded, tracked, and structured. The longer the list, the more in control I felt.
It was addictive, at least for a while. Productivity wasn’t framed as survival or obligation, but as liberation. If you could master your calendar, your inbox, your morning routine, then you weren’t just organized, you were powerful, the kind of person who had their life under control.
That was the message everywhere. Books titled Girlboss were on bestseller lists, Lean In circles were popping up in offices, and Instagram was full of pastel infographics about “hustle and flow.” Even rest was marketed as a performance enhancer: bubble baths with candles weren’t indulgences, they were “recovery protocols.” Every aspect of life became another arena to optimize.
It felt progressive, even radical at the time. Women claiming space in the workplace, starting businesses, rebranding ambition as something unapologetically feminine. But baked into that shiny surface was a trap: joy, leisure, and even identity itself got reframed as productivity. You weren’t just reading a novel, you were tracking how many you had already read that year. You weren’t journaling because you felt like it, you were “doing the work.”
But over time, the list stopped feeling like power. It started feeling like weight. Joy started showing up on the same page as the dishwasher. That’s when something inside the system shifted. Not because I suddenly didn’t want the things that would bring me joy, but because my brain began to treat them differently.
They stopped being wants. They became shoulds. And when life got crowded, the first things to be cut were always the joys.
What changes when something fun becomes a task?
Part of the answer lies in how our brains assign value. Psychologists call it self-determination theory. Our deepest motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Joyful activities usually check all three. A walk in the evening is freely chosen (autonomy). It makes you feel capable and alive (competence). And maybe you share it with a friend (relatedness). But once you put them on a list, they lose that intrinsic spark. Suddenly, the walk or the call or the journal entry feels externally imposed. Neuroscience shows that when intrinsic motivation gets reframed as obligation, our brain’s reward circuitry dims. What once lit us up now registers more like work.
Even philosophers noticed this long before us. Epicurus, centuries ago, described how chasing external markers of success can erode inner contentment: when we feel forced into pleasures, they stop feeling like pleasures at all. More recently, behavioral economists like Dan Ariely have shown how assigning arbitrary deadlines or framing intrinsic rewards as extrinsic obligations reduces motivation, a phenomenon psychologists call the overjustification effect.
Basically, your brain hears “must” and suddenly the activity becomes less appealing, even if it’s something you once loved.
This is where it gets tricky. Joy sneaks onto our lists, and lists flatten everything into the same hierarchy: joy sits right next to chores. And when life gets busy, I notice a shift. The trivial tasks like loading the dishwasher suddenly feel urgent, while the joyful ones become negotiable. One evening I skipped my walk just to scrub plates. It was such a small trade, but it revealed the pattern: joy was always the first thing I pushed aside.
Behavioral science calls this temporal discounting: we overvalue immediate, measurable obligations over delayed or subjective rewards. Your sunset walk or journaling session doesn’t scream “urgent” to the primitive brain in the same way as responding to an email or paying a bill. The result? Pleasure becomes a lower-priority category, a “nice-to-have” instead of a “must-do.”
Here’s the hard part: when we’re focused on efficiency and control (the very things that gave life structure and pride) we deprioritize what actually makes us feel alive. And that slow erosion is why so many of us end up busy and productive, yet somehow drained, wondering why the things we care about most keep getting postponed.
But I think the deepest layer is this: joy doesn’t obey the logic of productivity.
To-do lists are about control, predictability, mastery. They reassure us that we are “on top of things,” that life is orderly, that nothing will slip. Joy shows up in the unplanned moments. The messy, unscheduled ones we didn’t pencil in. It disappears when we start treating it like another checkbox. And when we try to control it, something essential gets lost.
So what do we do? Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) I put the list down. I let joy back into the wild. Because joy doesn’t need our permission or proof of productivity. Joy was never meant to be efficient.
Neither were we. We’re here to live.
You may also like:
Sources & Further Reading
Self-determination theory: Why autonomy, competence, and relatedness fuel intrinsic joy and why turning them into obligations reduces motivation. (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000)
Reward circuitry: How intrinsic motivation is altered when activities are reframed as obligations, affecting neural reward responses. (Murayama et al., 2010; Schultz, 2015)
Overjustification effect: Why reframing enjoyable activities as “shoulds” reduces motivation. (Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973; Ariely et al., 2009, in incentive contexts)
Epicurean philosophy: The distinction between natural pleasures and externally imposed “goods.” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus)
Temporal discounting: Why we overvalue immediate, measurable tasks over long-term or subjective rewards. (Ainslie, 1975; Frederick, Loewenstein & O’Donoghue, 2002)
Urgency effect: Why tasks with short deadlines feel more pressing than long-term priorities. (Zhu, Yang & Hsee, 2018)
What would it look like to prioritize pleasure? This is the kind of thinking you’ll find through The Guide to Becoming Alive. Highly recommend if you haven’t read it.
You're so real for writing completed tasks on a to do list just to check them off, I like to trick my brain into the same type of dopamine time to time hahah, another great read Katharina!