I wished to reach Plat. 1 today, but I failed. Strangely, losing made me realize something much more important than whether I reached it.

After losing, I decided to put on some music: “Sorrowful Tazmily (Restored) || MOTHER 3” by irikachana. It helped me, but what affected me the most was the artist's bio: “Learn to love the world a little more.”

When, for hours, you are lost in a tiny world of frustration and hatred, it can start feeling like that world is everything. But the world is wider than that. Way bigger. There are so many things that can be forgotten when all attention is focused on one goal.

The loss made me realize that reaching Grandmaster wouldn't actually give me what I thought it would. I was pursuing the result as if it would make all the time spent worth it, even though I didn't particularly care about the result itself. The goal had become a justification for the activity.

This made me think about how easily this happens with everything else.

"Would I still be doing this if nobody could see that I was doing it?"

We live in a world optimized around creating an audience, getting views, building a following, and turning everything into an investment. Software has its own version of this: make something, prove that it is better, show it to people, sell it, grow it. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But it can become easy to forget that making something can have value before anyone notices it.

What shocked me was discovering how many channels upload OSTs from obscure games. People painstakingly extract music from games that almost nobody knows, sometimes getting only a handful of views. They preserve something because they cared enough to preserve it.

Imagine spending hours extracting music from a video game and getting four views in five months. It might look like a waste of time.

But it isn't necessarily.

Things can be made because they are interesting. They can be archived because they deserve to exist. They can be shared because maybe someone, someday, will care about them. The audience can be a bonus rather than the reason.

Not everything needs to be an investment. Not everything needs an end goal.

Sometimes, doing something simply because you want it to exist is enough.

Maybe this is part of what it means to learn to love the world a little more.

Never I could have express what I felt like that. I'm too bad at writing.