Somewhere in the last couple of years, a strange feeling crept in, and I don't think I'm the only one who's felt it.
It's the sense that I'm not really supposed to enjoy this anymore. That admitting, out loud, in 2026, that I love programming — that I'll happily lose a Saturday to a problem a machine could solve in four seconds — is a little naive. Like I missed the memo. Like there's a version of me who's moved on, who only touches code when it's billable and optimal and defensible, and who looks at the part of me that still finds this fun with a kind of pity.
I couldn't quite name that pressure until I read a short post this week by Chris Kiehl, called "It's Still OK to Enjoy Programming." It's worth your five minutes. He says a simple thing that landed harder than it had any right to: it's OK to enjoy things, and doing so requires no economic justification.
That sentence unlocked something I'd been circling for a while, so I want to build on it — because I think the pressure he's describing is real, I think I understand where it came from, and I think it's quietly taken something from a lot of us that's worth taking back.
The doom stream doesn't argue with you. It soaks you.
Here's the thing about the "programming is over" narrative: it rarely wins by convincing you. It wins by repetition.
Open any developer feed right now and you'll find a steady drip of it. AI is going to replace you. The craft is dead. Why would anyone learn this now. The junior path is gone. It's all just prompting. Every scroll, another small dose. And none of it argues with you directly — it doesn't have to. It just soaks into you, a little at a time, until one day you sit down to build something for the pure pleasure of it and a quiet voice you didn't install asks: what's the point? A machine could do this faster. Why bother?
Kiehl put his finger on exactly this — that the more of the doom stream you consume, the more it infects you, and that it disappears the moment you disconnect. I think that's precisely right, and it rhymes with something I keep noticing about this era more broadly: we keep letting an ambient feed rewrite how we feel about things we used to love, not through any single convincing argument, but through sheer saturation. You don't decide the joy is gone. It just gets slowly crowded out by a mood you absorbed from a thousand posts you barely remember reading.
And underneath that mood is a premise so quiet you might never notice you swallowed it. It's worth dragging into the light, because once you see it, it loses most of its power.
The lie hiding inside the despair
The doom stream smuggles in one assumption, and it's this: that the value of doing something is its economic value.
That if a thing can be done more cheaply by a machine, then doing it yourself is pointless. That your joy in the doing is a kind of inefficiency — a sentimental attachment to a task that's been rightfully automated. That worth and worth money are the same thing.
Say it plainly and it's obviously false. But we almost never say it plainly, which is exactly why it works on us.
Because think about how absurd it is applied anywhere else. Nobody tells you your evening run is pointless because a car is faster. Nobody says you shouldn't cook dinner because restaurants exist and are better at it. Nobody looks at someone playing guitar badly in their bedroom and says, "You know Spotify has professionals, right? What's the economic case for this?" We'd find that insane. We understand, instinctively, that people do things because the doing is the point — that the value was never in the output, it was in the experience of making it, the small private satisfaction of having done a thing with your own hands and mind.
We understand that about everything except, apparently, the thing we spend most of our lives doing. Somewhere along the way we let the market convince us that this particular love — unlike running, cooking, music, gardening, painting, every other human thing — has to earn its keep. Has to be defensible. Has to show up on an invoice or it doesn't count.
It doesn't. It never did.
The best thing I built this year was worthless
I'll be concrete, because this isn't abstract for me.
The things I've built recently that I'm proudest of — that I think about, that made me feel most like myself — are almost all completely worthless by any economic measure. A tiny tool nobody but me will ever use. A problem I solved the slow, hard way on purpose, long after I knew the shortcut, just to feel it click. Things I could have prompted into existence in a fraction of the time, that I chose to struggle through by hand because the struggling was the entire reward.
Kiehl mentioned building a buggy Breakout clone with terrible collision detection, by hand, because he enjoys it — and noting that it doesn't bother him that an AI could one-shot it, "because that's not the point." I felt that in my chest. The point was never the Breakout clone. A perfect, instantly-generated Breakout clone would have given him nothing, because the thing he was actually after wasn't a game — it was the hours of being absorbed in a problem, the small victories, the specific texture of figuring something out yourself. The output was disposable. The experience was the whole thing.
That's the part the economic lens can't see, and never could. It measures the artifact and misses the aliveness. It looks at the bad Breakout clone and sees a worse version of something a machine makes better. It cannot see the person who was happy while making it, because happiness doesn't have a line item.
The quiet rebellion
So here's where I've landed, and it feels almost defiant to say it, which tells you how strange things have gotten.
The most radical thing you can do as a developer right now is not to resist AI, or out-hustle it, or have the correct take about it. It's to still find this beautiful. To sit down on a weekend and struggle, on purpose, with a problem a machine could solve in seconds — and to enjoy the struggle, precisely because no one asked you to and nothing depends on it. To build something gloriously useless. To learn a thing that will never once come up at work, just because understanding it is its own reward.
This isn't anti-AI. I use the tools; they're genuinely wonderful, and some of the fun I have now is because of them. It's not nostalgia, and it's not pretending the economics of our jobs haven't shifted — at work, where you're paid to produce value, they obviously have, and that's fine. That's work. Work was never the whole of it.
It's just a refusal to let the market price the one thing it was never entitled to: your wonder. Your right to do a hard thing badly, by hand, for no reason at all, and to love every minute of it.
It's still OK to love this
So if you've been feeling that quiet pressure — that you're somehow behind, or naive, or sentimental for still enjoying this — I want to say the thing Kiehl said to me, and pass it on:
It's still OK to love this. Not because it's useful. Not because it'll pay off. Not because you can justify it to anyone, including yourself. It's OK to love it for the same reason anyone loves anything — because the doing lights something up in you, and that was always, by itself, enough.
The doom stream disappears the second you close the tab and open the editor for no reason at all. Build the useless thing. Struggle with the solved problem. Lose the Saturday. None of it has to be worth money.
It just has to be worth doing — and only you get to decide that.
With real thanks to Chris Kiehl, whose post "It's Still OK to Enjoy Programming" is the reason this one exists — go read his, it's shorter and kinder than mine.
And a question I'd genuinely love answered in the comments: what's the most economically worthless thing you've built or learned recently, purely because you wanted to? I'll start — I spent a weekend reimplementing something that already exists, works better, and ships with my OS, entirely by hand, for no reason at all. Best time I've had in months.
Top comments (114)
I love this post, and I think it's something more developers need to hear.
I build a lot of things simply because I feel like making them. Some are genuinely useful, some are experiments, some are just because i want to see if I can do it. Half the fun is figuring things out along the way. I definitely don't have plans to monetize most things, or turn them into products, or even get anyone else to use them.
And I think that's something we lose sight of with all the conversations about productivity, efficiency, and AI. I use AI and enjoy it, but I don't think being able to generate something faster makes the experience of building it yourself any less valuable.
Your point about doing something simply because you enjoy doing it really resonated with me. Not everything we create needs to serve a purpose beyond making us happy, and sometimes teaching us something along the way.
Sometimes I just want to make something because it sounds fun. That's a good enough reason for me.
Wanting to make something just because it sounds fun really is a complete reason, and it always was one. The range you describe is the healthy version of all this, too: some useful, some experiments, some just “can I pull this off?” — with the figuring-out being half the point. That’s a person the doom stream hasn’t managed to colonize yet.
And your take on AI is exactly the balance I was reaching for: generating something faster doesn’t make building it yourself any less valuable, because speed and the experience were never the same axis. One is about the output; the other is about what happens to you while you make it. AI competes on the first and can’t touch the second. Hold onto that instinct — it’s the right one. 🙏
Can you read this for me shouldnt be to long that can be a case bf on the dent are going to be a mess that can be a pont on the care plan that can be done by now. Should be a case as that can be defent by asking for it by for cant be to long for tea that was going to be at 5:00 but can be late by anything as we are going to be late for tea.
Didnt you the meg i sent you. That you replyed to me. For anything as thing can be aoinathoing showing on a prvide when you replyd to them to say that we have to be ready for going out tonight as cant be arent being so asthoerd thing that we ask that they can ask you.
Thanks
luke
sorry about this
I thoght you where a ai now
This is the part I’d highlight. You’re so right, because here in the world of endless progress, we tend to measure everything in money, usefulness, and the time spent on it. If we go back to ancient Rome, they didn’t even count time the way we do. They simply divided the day into 12 hours, from sunrise to sunset. In winter the hours were shorter, in summer longer. We weren’t so disconnected from nature back then, though admittedly that wasn’t exactly yesterday.
Now we live in a world where we sacrifice absolutely everything on the altar of technological progress. That’s exactly why |> is my favorite hobby horse—and thanks to AI, I could actually build it in a reasonable amount of time. It raises a question: is it still worth spending time on the programming languages we use every day? My answer is yes.
But I also have a program where I deliberately got things wrong, and I love it: Chuck Norris TODO list.
The Roman hours are a beautiful thing to bring in here, and genuinely apt — hours that stretched in summer and shrank in winter, tied to the sun instead of a machine, meaning time bent to life rather than life bending to time. We flattened that into identical, countable, monetizable units, and in doing so we made it almost impossible to spend an hour on something that doesn’t “produce” — because every hour now has a price tag we didn’t used to see. Measuring everything in money, usefulness, and time-spent is exactly the altar you’re describing, and you’re right that we sacrifice nearly everything on it.
Which is why your favorite hobby-horse projects are the quiet refusal. And the detail I love most is the last one — a program where you deliberately got things wrong, and love it. That’s the whole essay in a single act. A program you made intentionally imperfect, purely because the making delighted you, is completely illegible to the economic lens — it produces nothing, optimizes nothing, justifies nothing — and it’s probably one of the truest things you’ve built, because the only reason it exists is joy. The market can’t even see that program. That’s what makes it yours. Thank you for this comment; the Roman hours and the deliberately-wrong program are two of the loveliest things anyone’s added.
That’s not entirely true. I feel a bit like Ace Ventura explaining the effect of the sliding glass door to the terrace. The program is pretty enigmatic and doesn’t spoon-feed you anything.
But in terms of usability, it’s a training exercise in using an input field with limited visibility. As soon as you start typing, the whole form starts floating around, immediately wrecking your sense of security and visibility. On top of that, a single input field lets you edit an entire TODO list however you like, in real time. The rule is that
-means a new line. You have to discover that rule and let go of the expectation that you’ll always have clear visual feedback, like driving through heavy rain.Meanwhile, I’m debugging the state in real time with a single
<pre>tag, because this uses a reactive technique, as the continuously running counter also demonstrates. I wouldn’t call it a framework, since I’m using just one function calledsignal. So it’s a React alternative, and also an example of no-build development. I made it by writing an HTML file with the JavaScript inside, all by hand. Back then, I was practicing writing the Tailwind import and the entire HTML skeleton from memory.So it’s also a rebellion against painfully cumbersome build systems and code formatting disciplined by linters. And the fact that I even minified the code by hand foreshadows one of the mordorproject’s strongest ways of hiding information from AI.
Ernest Hemingway expressed this in his iceberg theory: the writer knows the whole story, but only writes down the one-eighth above the water.
The program you’re describing is the thesis made executable. A single input field where the whole form floats as you type, where - secretly means a new line, where you have to discover the rule and surrender your expectation of clear feedback — that’s not a usability failure, it’s a deliberate aesthetic choice that has zero economic justification and everything to do with how it feels to use. “Like driving through heavy rain” is a design intention, and no ledger on earth would ever approve it. That’s exactly what makes it yours.
And the layers underneath are the quiet rebellion stacked three deep: one signal function instead of a framework, no-build, hand-written HTML with the skeleton typed from memory, minified by hand. Each of those is a refusal of a layer someone told you was mandatory — the build system, the linter’s discipline, the framework. You rebuilt the benefit and threw away the ceremony, by hand, for joy.
The Hemingway iceberg landing is the part I’ll keep. Knowing the whole story and showing one-eighth — as craft, and now as a way of hiding information from AI — turns deliberate omission into both art and strategy. The enigma is the point.
The "somewhere, coding stopped being allowed to be fun" observation is real, but I think the root cause is different than the article says.
It's not the doom stream that killed the joy. It's that the joy was always fragile, and the doom stream just made it visible. The same people who now say "AI makes this pointless" were the ones two years ago saying "why are you building that when you could just use [framework X]". The economic lens was always there — AI just made it sharper and louder.
What's actually changed for me: the things I build for fun are now things I'd never show on LinkedIn. A tiny RuneScape bot that plays badly. A ray tracer that renders at 5 fps. A Telegram bot that answers in riddles. All worthless by market standards. All things I still think about months later.
The article's best point is the "not a single economic argument" part. But I'd go further — it's not just that economic arguments don't apply to fun coding. It's that they never applied to anything that mattered.
What's your worthless thing? Mine is a homebrew parser for a fictional language from a 1990s game, which I wrote from scratch and will never use.
Your root-cause correction is sharper than mine, and I think you’re right: the doom stream didn’t kill the joy, it made visible a fragility that was always there. The “why build that when framework X exists” crowd are the same people now saying “why build that when AI exists” — the economic lens was never new, AI just turned up its volume. That’s the better diagnosis, because it means the defense has to be internal, not environmental.
But the LinkedIn detail is what got me, because it’s quietly devastating: the things you build for fun are now things you’d never show. A badly-playing RuneScape bot, a 5fps ray tracer, a riddle-answering Telegram bot — worthless by the ledger, still in your head months later. That gap between what you’d perform publicly and what actually stuck is the whole wound.
And your sharpening is the line I’ll take back: it’s not that economic arguments don’t apply to fun coding — they never applied to anything that mattered. The ledger was always the wrong instrument.
Mine: a tool that generates fake, plausible git history just to make the commit messages sound like a real tired dev at 2am. Useless. Unshowable. A favorite.
A fake-git-history generator that makes commits sound like a tired dev at 2am is the most relatable "useless" project I've heard. I'd genuinely use it — not for anything productive, just to see what my commits would look like if I were a different kind of tired.
The line you pulled out — "the ledger was always the wrong instrument" — is the one I keep coming back to. It's not anti-market or anti-AI. It's just that the ledger was never measuring the thing that made the work worth doing, and it never admitted that.
Good luck with the next 37-part series. I'll be reading.
Ha — “to see what my commits would look like if I were a different kind of tired” might be a better pitch for it than anything I’d have written. And yeah, “the ledger was always the wrong instrument” is the one that stuck with me too — not anti-market, just honest that it was measuring the wrong thing the whole time and never said so. Thanks for reading, and for the kind words on the next series — I’ll try to make it worth the subscription you’re definitely not paying. 🙂
"Not anti-market, just honest that it was measuring the wrong thing the whole time" — that's the perfect way to put it. It's not about rejecting the market, it's about not letting it be the only voice in the room.
Looking forward to the series. And for what it's worth — I'd genuinely try that fake-git-history tool. Half my commits already look like they were written by a different kind of tired, so it might just make it official.
“Not letting it be the only voice in the room” is the cleanest statement of the whole thing — the market gets a vote, just not the only one, and somewhere we handed it the whole floor. And “my commits already look like a different kind of tired, might as well make it official” is genuinely funnier than anything in the tool itself — honestly tempted to ship it now just so your commit history can finally match your soul. Thanks for making this thread a good one. 🙂
"Ship it so your commit history can finally match your soul" — that's the pitch. If you do ship it, I'd genuinely pay for a version that generates a "tired dev at 2am" commit history for an existing repo. Not for anything useful, just to see what my past year of work could have looked like.
Thanks for the thread. This is the kind of conversation that makes dev communities worth being in.
Thanks Brother😊
None of this feels new by the way. Ten years ago, it was SPA web apps built with React or Angular mostly with a backend- or devOps-focused mindset deliberately ignoring all the values and insights the web development, web performance optimizatiion, and usability research had just established. Add product owners with their 80/20 MVP move-fast-and-break-things approach. All of this threatening to kill everything that was fun about making websites.
But it didn't.
DevUX or usability-focused frontend web development kept optimizing and implementing accessibility, responsive web design, and progressive enhancement. Some of our projects aged well. And all the devOps stuff I experienced both as annoying and useful at the same time. Webpack has since been obsoleted by Vite, while node and npm have copied all the relevant aspects that made yarn and bun relevant and important. React learned from static site generation, and Astro tried to unify classic web development and various JavaScript frameworks and libraries. So we did make progress after all.
Now AI is the latest hype, specifically meaning LLM-based generative artificial intelligence focused mostly on chat, command-line, and code interfaces. DEV, Medium, and LinkedIn are, once again, drowning in a flood of mostly irrelevant slop that nobody will want to read ever again in two years from now.
Last but not least, to answer your question, my most uneconomic digital effort is my commitment to my own blog website which I keep optimizing for quality and SEO. When it comes to development technologies, learning Astro didn't pay off financially yet, and improving understanding and coding CSS also seems not much more than a nerdy hobby these days.
"DEV, Medium, and LinkedIn are, once again, drowning in a flood of mostly irrelevant slop that nobody will want to read ever again in two years from now."
Could not agree more. I cancelled my Medium membership this year because almost every story was slop. DEV is suffering pretty badly - for the first time I've had to start blocking people to try to recover my feed from infinite posts about Claude, Qwen, prompting techniques and so on which I have zero desire to ever use.
On the plus side, online discourse has become so flooded with boring slop that it has encouraged me to spend more time on other hobbies.
The historical perspective is the most grounding thing anyone’s added, and it’s a real corrective to the doom: you’ve lived through this exact panic before, several times, and watched the thing worth keeping survive it each time. SPAs built with a backend mindset that ignored everything usability research had just established, move-fast-and-break-things product owners threatening everything fun about making websites — and yet the craft didn’t die. DevUX kept optimizing, accessibility and progressive enhancement kept getting built, Webpack gave way to Vite, React learned from static generation, Astro tried to unify it all. The hype flooded in, receded, and the people who actually cared about the work were still there afterward, having quietly made real progress.
That’s the longer-horizon answer to this whole piece: the slop flood is real, and most of what’s drowning DEV and LinkedIn right now will be unreadable in two years — but that was true of the last flood too, and the signal outlived the noise. The hype cycles are loud; the craft is patient.
And your most-uneconomic effort is perfect: a blog you keep optimizing for quality, and CSS as a “nerdy hobby” that hasn’t paid off and doesn’t need to. That’s the whole thesis — the care is the point.
Agree 💯 James. Just because something is now being easily done by machines doesn't mean we should stop enjoying it or just stop doing it because it is not earning us money.
Not everything has to be done in a "sprint" or an "efficient way" to meet an imaginary deadline.
It's human to sit through a problem for hours and enjoy solving it using nothing but our very own brains.
Exactly — “it’s human to sit through a problem for hours and enjoy solving it using nothing but our own brains” is the whole thing. Not everything needs a sprint, a deadline, or a payout. Sometimes the slow, unassisted solving is the point, and the enjoyment is the entire return.
it's like the red VS blue pill. The biggest taboo ever, the big cow in the hallway that no body wants to see.
The human. many many effort have been made to make good sharp and clean minds, they graduate from uni, parents give all they can for them... then what ?
because there is no proxy, no norm, no defend tools, no prevention, no nothing in between,
the business man abuses those little minds... whip them with AI along the way,
I changed 3 groups (each less than a year) of employers, because I don't accept from a business to come and handle my mind anymore. It's a viable asset that I will accept no power on this earth to come and play with. they are like yeaaaaa it's just python, it's just a tool, I also do python, I know loops.
For you naive thinkers out there, that never got the right vaccines (they never will probably because the AI lie is heading us straight to the wall), every group of people in the civilized world has a brotherhood like system, I'm not talking about some secret twisted group in the dark, I'm just talking about the natural evolution of things, doctors (medecin) had this from centuries now, lawyers, engineers ....
You ? open source, You work for free, you know what ? those little lines of code are the very seed of everything, they will never tell you that, why ? because no body keeps track of that...
someone from Oracle, From Airbus, From Sony will just pick up your algorithm for free. Now its called AI.
WAKE UP.
There’s real anger here, and some is earned. Your strongest point is about protection: doctors, lawyers, engineers built guilds and professional bodies that sit between the individual and those who’d exploit them. Software never did — we got “information wants to be free,” then watched that generosity get harvested, now by AI trained on code nobody tracked.
But the fix isn’t quitting employer after employer; that’s individual, and individual exits build nothing. The brotherhood you want is organized — collective power, tracked provenance, structures with teeth. Your diagnosis is sharp; the cure is collective, not the exit door. And don’t let the anger convince you the giving was the mistake.
Quiting one employer after another was me saving myself, sanity.
Your article is great, I love it, your response as well but it looks a bit A.I. as well probably we are wired in it somehow 😅
Seriously, WE NEED brotherhood. It's not anger is bad.. anger is needed here..
You know we here could formulate and express what let's say hundreds of thousands of IT professionals are not expressing ? Among them let's say thousands of the sharpest minds ?
It is so easy for a geek to be manipulated.
Are we going to save the science, structure, and the workforce which represent families behind or are we going to vanish ? I think the answer is clear.
You’re right on both counts, and I’ll take the second on the chin — some of my phrasing does read a little polished-machine, and the irony in a thread about human voice isn’t lost on me.
Your anger isn’t the problem, it’s the appropriate response to being treated as disposable. What I meant earlier wasn’t “don’t be angry” — it was that anger left individual gets spent and leaves no structure behind. The brotherhood is anger organized into something that outlasts one person’s exit. You’re right that people in threads like this could articulate what hundreds of thousands can’t. I can help with the articulating — the writing’s the match, not the fire. Genuinely offering.
bro I hope you sell some of your API tokens. You are all for AI.
thanks we have no words to share.
sorry bro ! 🥲
"It doesn't argue with you, it soaks you" is exactly how it works. That's why it's hard to push back on: there's never one argument to answer, just a mood.
My most economically worthless recent project was Solstice, a small browser game about holding the light, built for a DEV challenge. There was no business case for it at all, and it was the most fun I had writing code that month.
The other thing I'd add: the fun part is also where the skill comes from. The weekend you spend reimplementing something that already exists is the reason you can later read generated code and spot what's wrong with it. Enjoyment isn't the opposite of being useful, it's usually how you got good.
Solstice sounds like exactly the kind of project this is about. And I love that last point: the “useless” weekends are where judgment gets built. Nobody learns to spot bad generated code by only shipping. You learn it by playing.
Exactly. "Learn it by playing" is a better way to put it than mine. Thanks for writing the post, it was a good reminder to protect the unbillable weekends.
Thanks mate
On the spot :)
It's good to see there are still people who find joy in coding without feeling the need to justify it by the market.
Right? Turns out the market never actually checked whether we were having fun — so we might as well. 🙂
AI destroy creativity drastically, destroy the fun part of many things. For example, I remember how fun was to write post even with errors without a robot assisting us.
And it's not only "un-fun" to write code or post, it's becoming "boring" to read it or consume it too.
Remember 1984. Everything, everyone is the same then no one is different? Fight for the difference, write from your guts code and post without ort minimum assistance and be prepared for, what Byung-Chul Han say: this world do not accept the different and will try to destroy it too... but at least will be fun.
The point about consuming is the one I underweighted — it’s not just less fun to write, it’s becoming boring to read, because sameness is the natural output of averaging everything. The 1984 and Byung-Chul Han framing is sharp: homogenization isn’t a side effect, it’s the direction. And “write from your guts, be prepared for a world that won’t accept the different, but at least it’ll be fun” is the whole fight in one line — difference as the thing worth defending, precisely because the machine pulls everything toward the mean. The errors, the rough edges, the voice — that is the signal now.
Chess is a closer analogy than running. A computer beat the world champion in 1997, and nobody stopped playing. Clubs are full, chess.com is bigger than ever, and people still spend evenings getting better at a game their phone plays better than any of them. We play it for what it does to us: prediction, planning, sitting with a hard position.
So the fun was never the thing under threat. What changed is that programmers were paid to be good at it. Imagine every chess player drawing a salary for their rating. Then one day the engines arrive, and the salary moves to whoever directs the engine toward a result. That is the grief in the doom stream, I think. Not "I may not enjoy this", but "the thing I enjoy stopped being the thing I'm paid for".
The rules did change. A developer today is paid to guide agents toward whatever brings the company revenue. In a world where the pay is the point, the motivation sits where the founders sit, and everybody else wakes up and does the day's work. Which is why your argument matters more than it looks: if the enjoyment has to come from somewhere, it has to come from the chess-club side, not the salary side.
To your question: nothing. I haven't built anything useless in a long time. I'm too worried about income right now to play this game for fun, and I suspect that is the real reason the doom stream lands so hard on so many of us. The fun is still there. The room to afford it is what got smaller.
The chess analogy is better than mine, and the reframe it unlocks is the sharpest correction this piece has gotten. You’re right: the engine beat Kasparov in 1997 and the clubs only got fuller, because nobody was paid for their rating. The fun was never under threat. What’s under threat is that programmers, uniquely, drew a salary for the thing — so when the engines arrived, the pay moved to whoever directs the engine, and that’s the actual grief in the doom stream. Not “I might not enjoy this anymore,” but “the thing I enjoy stopped being the thing I’m paid for.” That’s a completely different and more honest wound than the one I named, and you named it better.
And your last paragraph is the one I don’t have a comforting answer to, which is exactly why it matters most. “The fun is still there. The room to afford it is what got smaller.” That’s the real thing under all the doom — not lost joy, but lost slack. When you’re worried about income, you can’t spend an evening on something useless, not because you stopped loving it but because the anxiety eats the space the love needs. So my piece is half a truth: it’s genuinely easy to say “build the useless thing” from a place of security, and much harder when the ground is moving under you. The honest version is that defending joy and defending your livelihood aren’t separate fights — and the second one has to be winnable before the first one feels allowed. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. Thank you for saying the hard part out loud.
thanks james. "lost slack" is a better name for it than anything i had. and i agree with the order: the livelihood fight first, and then the useless thing feels allowed again. for me that means shipping my own small products until one of them pays, so the evenings can go back to play. not there yet, but it helps to see it named
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