This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.

These two lines really hit home:

> You don’t have to listen to any other voices here, except that quiet one inside of you that’s gently urging you to do the thing you know you need to do.

> You don’t need to know where it’s going to lead. For that matter, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to come of it.

That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right (to me).

> I’ve spent pretty much every night in recent memory burning through video games, and I finally, inevitably, hit the wall with that approach.

I feel like I can only play games that are about 20-50 hours and have a definitive end or game that you can chip away at an hour at a time (e.g. EAFC). Even playing for just a couple hours a night feels like time that could be going towards a side project but time to unwind is important.

this resonates.

"consumption-to-creation ratio" are words i've never put to that positive feeling of choosing to code over watching another TV show or the negative feeling of the alternative choice.

recently i feel like vibe coding is a cheat code in this respect - i can code while watching TV... and a few times the output of the vibe coding exercise was interesting enough to switch to full attention coding.

I feel like there are two kinds of side projects. One type is a small project that can be coded up in a short time (a weekend or a few evenings). It reaches a functional stage rather quickly and only takes a few hours to fix bugs or improve the user experience.

The other type is much bigger and can take months or even years. New features are added from time to time, but must also fit into a well defined architecture.

Both types can be satisfying but require different approaches. The first gives you a bunch of different projects that get shuffled around and easily abandoned. The second requires more discipline as you continually build upon previous layers.

Since they are both side projects, you can go weeks without looking at them or spend all your spare time on them for extended periods.

I have a side project that I have dabbled with for a decade. There are months where I get many features working and others where I barely look at it. It just depends on what else is happening in my life at the moment.

I love this, and yes can completely relate. The last side project I got absorbed into[0] completely consumed me for a weekend. I was driven like a man possessed to finish it before Monday. I had to leave the house and stake out a corner in a coffee shop to concentrate. The scope of the project was perfect: it was small enough to do in a weekend, I was building something I needed, and something that could help others. Creating something is so much fun, especially when you have a long-lasting way to share it like your own website.

I know people disparage LLMs for not building any serious code. Yes it's only a hobby project and not a production system, but my little project really would never have left the ground without it.

[0] https://mattsayar.com/i-didnt-want-to-pay-for-a-newsletter-e...

I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have in my career came because my side projects were interesting and sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's so much specialization in our era – being able to connect dots across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a superpower.

I like to have side projects that end in a blog post. So many people never share side projects because they are going for perfection and give up on the way, but if the end result is not code or a product I find it more enjoyable to work on. Like have a vision of what you want to explore and focus on that.

Most of my creation is done at work now, previously more balanced outside of work with side projects but with little kids a more demanding job its hard, so outside work time is more consumption, though some of that is social consumption which I feel has value (pub, gaming).

I was thinking of this with relation to the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which asserts that "a personal project can be a powerful tool for finding and cultivating that meaning, providing purpose and resilience in the face of adversity." [1]

[1] summary by Gemini

Really enjoying this thread, especially the points about creative cycles and the connection between stress and our drive to create. I recently wrote a book that dives into some of this, blending behavioral psychology with mindset principles like the law of attraction. It’s all about how our habits, thoughts, and environment shape our ability to stay inspired and follow through on projects.

If anyone’s curious, I’m happy to send over a free copy—just reply. Always love connecting with others who think deeply about creativity and motivation.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DWM35DXH