Sounds good to me! Ratings are a treadmill. As you get better so do your opponents. You'll always have a ~50% winrate.
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.
Your analogue is probably true to a certain extent, but in reality maintaining your current form in any domain of expertise is easier than achieving that form in the first place.
I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.
I've accepted that I'm worse at chess than other people in some innate sense, but puzzles have been nice. I really enjoy the chess.com lessons as well, and listening to someone explain stuff is always pleasant. I might not absorb much, but it's better than nothing.
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.