The Quiet Fuguelike Joy

In the comments on my previous post (about creating a 1-mile hex map of Japan with the help of Claude) somebody popped up to say: 

I don't understand how it scales up your ambitions for campaign settings - creating a map has never been the bottleneck. More hexes to fill means more human-work.

I found this interesting. Don't get me wrong - I understand the point being made. Laboriously filled in a 1-mile hex map of Japan does not on the face of it reflect a more ambitious campaign setting, which would require, if anything, the opposite (namely, big, sweeping, large-scale ideas and inventiveness). 

But I would like to stick up for this type of project, on the grounds that 'more human-work' is by no means necessarily a bad thing. I happen to think that keying a 1-mile per hex map of Japan would be a very pleasurable activity in its own right. It would be a life's work - if it took 5 minutes to key every single hex it would still take you decades, working at evenings and weekends. But would that be any more of a waste of time than doing jigsaw puzzles, playing video games, or watching TV?

Activitiy like this has its own pleasure. This is often misleadingly and ignorantly labelled 'mindfulness', although it's really the opposite of that. It is really more to be understood as the pleasure of being in a creative fugue-state, where the external world ceases to matter for a while and the conscious mind becomes absorbed in the completion of a focused task. This is the brain-state which we enter when drawing a picture, writing, practicing a musical instrument, and so on, and although it is not filled with intense pleasure it does produce a mild and continuous sense of tranquility, relaxation, and enjoyment.

A month or two ago I made a post advocating world building as a hobby in its own right, and this type of task - keying huge and detailed maps - is clearly a very concentrated and distilled version of that activity. Just now I asked Claude to make me a set of hex maps of Kyrgyzstan, at country, region, and district level. Tell me that the urge to get keying doesn't come over you when looking at this stuff: