Countless students, even some of my peers at Notre Dame, lose the forest for the trees in the pursuit of single-minded potency. You should be excited to write for yourself, even if the reason you are writing is a class assignment in and of itself. Inevitably, your end product will be better than if you were only focused on word count, or God forbid, had to resort to AI to write for you. Writing is an artistic venture, and, truthfully, is a more complete manifestation of the self compared to visual or sensory mediums. When he's not rehearsing his violin for the campus orchestra, he's spending his paycheck at a farmer's market or playing golf.