The grind: farming XP without knowing what for

It was three in the morning. I was in the same dungeon, killing the same lesser dragon, collecting the same scale that dropped once every ten attempts. I needed forty. I was on the ninth. And the worst part: I knew exactly what I was doing, knew it was tedious, and went back in anyway.

That's the grind. And if you stop and think for two minutes, you'll realize you do it outside the game too.

What grinding is and why it exists

In RPGs and MMOs, grinding is the phase where progress exists but is obtuse. You kill enemies, gather resources, repeat actions — not because it's fun, but because there's a reward on the other side that you want. A higher level. Better gear. Access to a new area.

Designers know this. The grind exists because it's cheap to produce and expensive to escape: you can spend forty hours in a dungeon without the studio needing to create forty hours of new content. The progression is real; the effort is real; the sense of achievement, partially manufactured.

But you go anyway. I went. And not out of naivety — because the number climbing on screen gave a specific satisfaction that's hard to find anywhere else.

The real-life grind has another name

Call it routine. Or career. Or discipline. It depends on how much you like what you're doing, and how honest you're being about it.

Monday at the gym is the grind. The end-of-month spreadsheets are the grind. Studying a subject you didn't choose but need to pass is the grind. The difference between grind that builds and grind that drains is a single thing: you know — or at least believe — that the effort is heading somewhere.

The problem appears when the direction disappears. When you're repeating the same moves without knowing why anymore. When the "level" you wanted to reach arrived and the feeling was "...so what?" When you're farming without being sure the final boss is ever going to show up.

Camus wrote about this before RPGs existed. The myth of Sisyphus — the guy condemned to roll the boulder up the mountain forever, watch it roll back down, start again — is the grind pushed to the edge of absurdity. His conclusion was that the only way to survive the futility is to imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because the situation is good, but because the alternative is to despair over something that has no way out.

In practice, at three in the morning in the dungeon, that's harder to feel.

Useful grind vs. empty grind

There's a simple test — one I learned less from productivity books and more from playing old RPGs:

Useful grind has a skill, a capacity, or a position waiting on the other side. You write every day because you want to write better. You practice because you genuinely want to improve. The effort has a destination, even if the destination is vague.

Empty grind has only the loop. You execute because it's in the script. Because it's what everyone does. Because stopping feels scarier than continuing. The question "what for?" has disappeared — not because the answer is obvious, but because you stopped asking.

Most real-world grinding is a mix of both, and that's fine. What matters is being able to tell the difference. Not necessarily to drop everything — sometimes the grind needs to be completed even without immediate meaning. But to know what you're trading for the time you put into it.

There's a related trap I explored in the post about save scumming: the tendency to reload the save instead of accepting a bad drop and moving on. In the grind, the analogue is insisting on the same loop expecting a different result. Eventually you either accept the drops that come, or you go to another dungeon.

When to leave the grind

In games, it's straightforward: when you have enough XP, or when you quit. In life it's more complicated because the systems are opaque. There's no visible progress bar. You can't tell if you need ten more monsters or a thousand. And the final boss might never appear.

This connects to another question worth thinking about separately: what difficulty setting are you playing on? Because grind that makes sense on normal mode can be masochism on hard — or disguised laziness on easy.

What helps you decide when to stop: distinguishing between grind you chose and grind that was chosen for you. One isn't necessarily better than the other — sometimes mandatory grinding takes you to places you wouldn't have reached on your own. But the difference matters for how you'll sustain the loop.

Quitting the grind isn't failing. It's a decision to allocate a finite resource — time — toward something else. In games, it's called "putting the game down." In life, it's called changing priorities. Sometimes the right move is not to finish.

The honesty of the grind

What I like about the in-game grind is that it's honest. The game doesn't pretend that killing the hundredth goblin is exciting. It shows you the number going up and you decide whether that number is worth your time.

Life rarely shows you the number. You run on autopilot, repeating the moves, without a clear feedback interface. The useful practice — one that anyone who's spent hours farming in a JRPG intuitively understands — is stopping once a week and asking: do I know which number I'm increasing? Does it make sense to increase that number? If not, which number should it be?

It doesn't solve the absurdity. But at least you grind with your eyes open. And that, oddly enough, changes quite a bit about how the loop feels.