In mid-November 2022, a University of Connecticut student named Luke Lorraine was walking to class when his toe clipped a rock. There was nothing remarkable about the smallish gray-green pebble, but Lorraine ended up kicking it all the way to class, a little over a mile, then pocketed it for later. He had remembered something his bandmate told him a few weeks prior: that a rock rolled consistently on a hard surface would eventually become a sphere. 

Lorraine resolved to find out if that was true. He set up a TikTok account, @guykickingrock, and began posting daily updates until, after 11 months and three rocks, his mission was achieved. Rock #3, if not a perfect sphere, was certainly an easy-rolling ball. In the process, @guykickingrock gained close to a million followers.

It’s hard to say which is more remarkable: that Lorraine saw his somewhat random, low-reward goal through to the end, or that so many people wanted to follow his attempt. Yet social media is full of people committed to similarly arbitrary, repetitive projects—activities with no greater purpose or meaning, that are carried out simply for their own sake.

Noah Kalina, for example, has taken a photograph of himself every day for more than 25 years. Michael Carmichael has been painting a baseball since 1977; after more than 30,000 coats, the ball now has a circumference of more than 19 feet and is a tourist attraction in Indiana. And on TikTok, Matt Brockman has gained more than 2 million followers for his impressive trick shots—like tossing a playing card between two coins, or stacking cups in midair—while also documenting the hours of tedious repetition it can take to succeed. It took Brockman two hours to roll a coin into a bottle cap, for example, and nearly two days to land a playing card in a rotating plastic sleeve.