Thought-provoking piece, but I think it ignores one key item: we naturally gravitate to doing what we love. We don't need to write them down. I never wrote down, "build a dual-stack homelab with a handcrafted firewall and a 10Gbe fiber backbone with multiple VLANs and subnets and two virtualization hosts and a 12TB TrueNAS server, and DNS and Minio and DHCP and k8s." Of the hundreds of hours I spent on my homelab, I don't think I ever wrote down a "quest" or "goal".
Similarly, I love swimming in the open cold water, but I never wrote down, "Swim from Alcatraz twice". It wasn't necessary. It happened organically.
But notice that you cherry-picked accomplishments that sound impressive. You didn't say "I watched 10 seasons of The Office", "I wasted over 8000 hours on HN", or "I impulse-bought a shed full of tools I never use", it happened organically!
Similarly, I love swimming in the open cold water, but I never wrote down, "Swim from Alcatraz twice". It wasn't necessary. It happened organically.