how to stay in love with what you do

notes from a rabbit hole

Dec 12, 2025

yesterday, i posted a question:

how do you stay in love with what you do?

let yourself feel the good parts.
keep challenging yourself.
let curiosity lead the way.
see it all through a kid’s eyes.

what i heard beneath your responses was reimagining: learning to see what you already know, differently, tenderly, and again.

which brings me to something i’ve to believe, which is that you don’t fall out of love from doing too much.

you fall out of love from doing the same thing, over and over.

lately, i’d been telling the same kinds of stories, ones that performed well but didn’t particularly excite me to sit down and make, so the early shadow of burnout was blooming at the edges again.

then stranger things season five was released last week, and running up that hill resurfaced after three quiet years.

suddenly, i was nineteen again and grappling with turning twenty. and i wondered: with the technology that has emerged during this gap between show seasons, could i recreate the feeling of that scene that continues to inspire me deeply?

i needed to find out. right now.

the practical advice would’ve been to ignore such a feeling.

it didn’t fit my content calendar. the project could not breathe in-between upcoming deadlines. it offered no alignment with my strategy, no clear return on my time. and it looked like a complicated, multi-day project i wasn’t sure if i could accomplish to a presentable quality.

so, rationally, i went to a park that afternoon, got my knees and skirt muddy, and filmed myself getting up and down from the ground for an hour—while aunties practicing qi gong and kids on the nearby benches looked over, wide-eyed.

i think that’s a long-winded way of saying:

you have more agency than you think.
you can follow the curiosity that makes you pause in your path.
you can follow the rabbit hole and stray off that path, even for just a little while, to see what you find.

so here’s my answer to the question:

notice the things that make you feel like a curious child again—
then take them seriously enough to act on them.
even when it’s inconvenient.
especially when it’s inconvenient.

that’s how you stay in love.

-love, cole