…why aim to do a marathon, a novel, or indeed anything, rapidly but badly?

Because “rapidly” isn’t the opposite of “badly”. In fact, in many things, speed is a desireable quality in a piece of work.

If so, “In addition, going back and improving, drawing from, or changing that work can produce something that is worthy of merit…” is totally invalid.

My suggestion was that this could be done at the end, not as part of NaNoWriMo, as a means to make a “good” piece of work out of a “bad” one. The difference between a marathon run “sloppily” (not sure what that means in the case of a marathon) and a writing competition with “sloppy” participation is that at the end of the writing competition you have a physical product that can be adapted and improved upon – “de-sloppified”, if you like – whereas at the end of a marathon you merely have sore legs.

However, I still find the whole “made-up targets” affair depressing in the same way new year’s resolutions are depressing; why does it take the beginning of another unit of time, which humans have delimited into orbital periods of the planet we happen to be on, to spur people into action on something they should care to do anyway?

Because humans think in patterns, which is absolutely fundamental to their understanding of the world. This doesn’t mean that it is necessary to start things on particular dates or in particular ways, merely easier. I agree with you entirely on the whole affair, and I find New Year’s Resolutions depressing for the same reasons. The difference here is that yes, any human could pick any arbitary length of time to undertake a challenging writing project – “100,000 words between May 24th, 7:10am and July 6th, 9:24pm” – but there are benefits to it being the way it is: first and foremost, multiple people doing such a challenge together provides a morale boost to many of those involved, inspiring them to achieve what they otherwise might not, and therefore allowing folks like me the feeling that we might just succeed! Secondly, exactly one calendar month is easy for pretty much any human to measure, and exactly 50,000 words is a fair target for this amount of time for many people, and an easy number to multiply into 1,000 word (2%) blocks, which provides focus.

The point is that just because, like me, you find these arbitary measurements of effort depressing doesn’t mean that you should protest against them through non-participation in associated effort-related events: human pattern-matching means it’s still useful for being able to quickly gauge progress, and even if you’ll find no inspiration in the simultaneous efforts of others (either through impressive work or simple competition) you can surely appreciate that you will be helping others who are affected in these ways.

No personal insults were meant, but at the time of writing, I didn’t care either way – really – whether you understood or not, and even now, I don’t know how I’d help you to do so. In the end, you seem to be unable to comprehend why others and I are doing this activity, and I don’t know what I can do to solve that. The “anticipated questions” I answered in the original post were targetted at readers who would be misunderstanding from entirely the opposite perspective from you, and not one I’d fully considered when I wrote the post.