on doing pointless things
someone might call this "doing something for the hell of it". i would call it "doing it because i can". this doesn't discount trying something i have no skill or background in. i'm doing the thing because "i can". that's always enough for me
why are you taking photos of items in your living area?
because i can
yeah but why? are you going to do anything with them?
possibly, at the very least i'll look at them after i've moved them to my computer
yeah but don't you want to share them?
this is an afterthought of the action of taking photos around my living area. i definitely could, and i probably will. this part is not dependent on the taking of photos
learning though a "because i can" approach
a lot of times, a new interest, a new way of doing things, often shows up through this approach. especially as my corporate knowledge of tech is slowly replaced by the love i had for tech before my career killed it temporarily
why not try a bunch of self-hostable items? why not go on a search for nextcloud but just calendars and to-do lists? then you learn that caldav servers exist and all of a sudden a shared calendar, todo list, between devices gets so much more appealing
where "because i can" isn't the best approach
just because you dug up an old slide projector your grandma had tucked away that definitely looks like it is from the 50s. don't just plug it in. i'm glad it worked, but emma, later on you'll learn guitarists just straight up died in the era of two prong when it really should've had a ground devices