Keeping One Eye on the Prize

Once you've gathered your tools, you need to do something with them.
I feel swamped in a tech bubble moment where there's a lot of tool-building and conversations about tools and their potential for building more tools. I.e. AI and tech, and it's potential for helping folks build more platforms for AI and tech etc. etc.
However, I feel like I'm missing exposure to activity where those tools are in use for an external end purpose.

Everyone is so focused on the shovels for the gold rush, but what are people actually doing with their gold?

Sure, selling shovels is a lucrative business to be in but it's a few steps removed from where people are living.
Like I'm selling guitars, but never actually experiencing music.

And so it is with building this writing muscle: a means to what end?
What do you say when you've found your voice?
What do you use your fancy AI model for once you've got the one that's passing all the right benchmarks?

This feels like a fast-track train to existential questions around what counts as living vs striving to live.
Don't medics just equip you with health so that you can get busy living? Isn't education just a means to navigating the world?

Which activities count as an end as opposed to a means to an end?

Some ideas bubbling to the surface immediately:

• Creating art, for art's sake
• Exploring, discovering and appreciating the physical world
• Learning new ideas, and other ways of thinking for the sake of it
• Play
• Consuming art for art's sake

Whatever else is on the list, I could do with more deliberate representation in my daily interaction-sphere. So it's not all means and no ends, even though some means are ends in themselves. Can't you just write for the pleasure of writing? Or build muscle for the delight of progress? It is useful to prepare;

"If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of my body" - Mickey Mantle

but that's not always the point and I'm not trying to keep sight of that.