A kindergarten reward chart for adults who lost the plot. Tell it what you like. It will hand you tiny missions. Finish one and a blue star drops onto the paper.
Filed under: attention, regret, the cost of a wasted Saturday.
Side-Quest Maxxer began as a joke, and it ended up being necessary. The premise was simple: a reward chart for adults who had clearly lost their way. The motivation: a disturbing number of people fear that looking back at this decade, all they'll realize is that most of it was spent mindlessly scrolling.
It is worse than anyone wants to believe. According to the latest data from the DataReportal's 2024 Global Digital Report, adults spend just under seven hours daily using screens, with social media alone accounting for almost two and a half of them. In her famous book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the hospice nurse Bronnie Ware reiterates the same idea: dying individuals don't usually regret things they tried; rather, they are upset that they failed to take full advantage of the life they lived. Similarly, all the "soft life," "romanticize your life," and "main character energy" crazes that dominated TikTok between 2022 and 2025 represent nothing but that quiet terror in nicer clothes.
Psychology has an elegant term to define such phenomena. According to Self-Determination Theory introduced by Deci and Ryan, humans need autonomy, competence, and novelty to feel alive. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2023 shows that low-risk, novel experiences trump big plans by miles in terms of contributing to people's everyday well-being. Small and quirky actions, done deliberately and purposefully, become pillars.
This is why Side-Quest Maxxer became what it is now. A user inputs any kind of interest and gets one assignment — listen to one jazz song, learn one phrase in French, photograph a spoon alongside a jellyfish, etc. They perform said assignment, and get a reward — a star placed somewhere on the chart. That's the entire feature — no shame about breaks, no guilt for not achieving anything in a week or so, no push towards a more efficient way to live.
If it seems pointless, great. Everything worth remembering at the end of the day looks rather point-less when written down.