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Good morning. It's Monday. I want you to do something stupid today.
Not bad-stupid. Off-script-stupid. Skip-the-spreadsheet-for-an-hour stupid.
I want you to go on a side quest.
Last Friday my wife and I were maybe-possibly thinking about moving, so we drove into a couple of neighborhoods we've never lived in and just walked around. Pretended we lived there. Looked at front yards. Read coffee shop menus. Stared at houses we'd never own.
I've been in LA for 16 years. There is a small lake in a neighborhood I've driven past a thousand times. An actual lake. I had no idea it existed.
Sixteen years and I never looked.
That was the whole side quest. And I'm still thinking about it three days later.
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What a side quest is
It's a phrase from video games. The optional missions you take that have nothing to do with the main story. Then Gen Z grabbed it and turned it into a whole way of living.
There are now over 27 million posts tagged "side quest ideas" on TikTok. Threads has whole accounts dedicated to it (@coolgirlceo's monthly side quest list is genuinely good). Substack writers and lifestyle press have all been running 2026 lists.
A creator named Lauren put it best, via The Everygirl:
"We focus so much on our main quest that we completely forget that having all these side quests is what makes life so much fun."
The main quest is the to-do list. The launch. The pipeline. The kid's lunchbox. It will not stop existing if you ignore it for ninety minutes.
Why this isn't just vibes
Here's the part nobody talks about. Side quests aren't just fun. They literally slow down your sense of time.
Your brain is a memory machine. New experiences trigger dopamine release in the hippocampus, which encodes those moments in richer detail. More frames. More context. When you look back, those days feel longer. Fuller.
The flip side is the part that should scare you. If every Monday looks like last Monday, your brain doesn't bother encoding it. The week disappears. The month disappears. The year disappears. Then you turn around and it's December and you can't remember a single specific Tuesday.
Andrew Huberman talks about this on his podcast in much more detail. The short version: people who say "this year flew by" are people who didn't side quest enough.
That's the whole pitch. Side quests are how you steal back the year.
Pick one. Do it before midnight.
Stop reading. Pick one.
Get off your subway stop or highway exit one early. Walk the rest.
Eat lunch alone at a place you've never eaten. No phone on the table.
Text the person you've been meaning to text for six months. Just say hi.
Walk around your block looking only for one color.
Buy the weirdest thing at the bodega and figure out what to do with it.
Sign up for one event on Eventbrite tonight. Doesn't matter how dumb.
Take the longest possible route home from work.
Find a record store, used bookstore, or weird museum within ten miles. Go.
Call your mom. (Yes, that counts.)
Talk to a stranger for five real minutes. Not a transaction. A conversation.
I don't care which one you pick. I care that you don't pick zero.
When you do it, reply to this email and tell me what you did. The weirdest, smallest, dumbest ones are the ones I want. I'll feature the best in Friday's edition.
The main quest will still be there tomorrow.
— Michael
P.S. Coming on the podcast counts as a side quest. Book it here.
P.P.S. If you want the science rabbit hole on novelty, memory, and time perception, this Quanta piece and the Huberman episode are where I went down it.
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