I've been wrestling with this for a good long while as well. A lot of business-y, corporate weight on my shoulders from $DAYJOB piling up and feeling out of touch with code at times.

I'm glad I still manage to have moments like OP every now and then

I’ve finally gotten to a place in my life financially where I don’t care as much about the potential of making money from side projects and get to just build what I find interesting with the care and attention that I’ve always wanted.

It’s very zen, finally I feel no pressure to make progress, or feel like I’m wasting time by refactoring.

Sometimes I’d spend days just trying to get an animation exactly how I wanted to, or build vanity features entirely because they’re cool.

Everything else I’ve worked on, had aspirations of making money one day, and it quickly becomes a job.

(Working on https://canine.sh)

It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good".

My last significant side project was the opposite of "blissful". In order to preserve and migrate some important personal data I had to reverse engineer an obsolete, undocumented file format. Then I had to use a confusing and badly documented commercial library to convert the data into a modern file format. I had to figure everything out through trial and error with nearly zero support. It was a frustrating pain in the ass from start to finish and while I'm satisfied with the results I didn't enjoy a minute of it.

I had a lot of fun overengineering the hell out of the status bar in Sway recently. It was something that I got working in fifteen minutes in Bash, and then ended up rewriting in Clojure, then figuring out how to get working with GraalVM, and then just kept adding features and making it more customizable.

None of this was that hard (outside of making it async-friendly, that was a little tricky), but it also wasn't trivial. I had Law and Order on in the background, and I hacked on it for a few days, and it did kind of get me into a "zen state". Figuring out how to make the code more flexible and figuring out which features I can feasibly add was relaxing.

I think part of it was that there's really no consequences to this. If I screw something up, no one is going to be mad at me, no one is going to yell at me, I'm not going to get fired, and I'm allowed to go off onto any tangents that I would like because I'm just doing this for fun. It doesn't feel like "work" because "work" often involves me working on stuff I don't want to work on. If something is too frustrating, I don't have to go through approvals and legal to import a library that does it for me. I can spend as much or as little time as I'd like writing documentation. I can micro-optimize or not-optimize however I'd like.

And fundamentally, if I screw something up, it's the text on the Swaybar, it's really not the end of the world.

It can be tough to find a project that holds my interest enough to get into this. I tend to have the most fun working on stuff that is completely unimportant, because if I'm not trying to change the world, then I can be as creative as I like.

Said it before and will say it again : side project are the antidote to burnout.

You need to have some agency in your life and being able to pick a project you like and doing it the way you want is vital. Sadly, it's being taken away from us, so reclaim that right !

-Written by human, not AI

Love that you added this to the footer on your website. Goodbye ‘organic’ and ‘non-GMO’ and hello ‘AI-Free’ XD

I’ve had a similar feeling lately after deciding to dust off some old textbooks and brush up on my math.

I’ve noticed I get this same feeling by writing a tight prompt to AI. Not even reading the result fully, just sending it to be deep processed.

Good for a quick hit of bliss zen when you need it.

Ah yes, "blissful" Zen. That's the best kind!

---

It reminds me of Yunmen, a monk who lived in China. He was born around 860 A.D. and he lived ninety years. His enlightenment story is a classic:

One day, Yunmen went to visit Mujo. When Mujo heard Yunmen coming, he closed the door to his room. Yunmen knocked on the door. Mujo said, “Who is it?”

Yunmen said, “It’s me.”

Mujo said, “What do you want?”

Yunmen said, “I’m not clear about my life. I’d like the master to give me some instruction.”

Mujo then opened the door, took one look at Yunmen and closed it again.

Yunmen knocked on the door like this for three days in a row. On the third day, when Mujo opened the door, Yunmen stuck his foot in the door. Mujo grabbed Yunmen and yelled, “Speak! Speak!” When Yunmen began to speak, Mujo gave him a shove and said, “Too late.” Mujo slammed the door. Yunmen’s foot was still there, and the slamming door broke Yunmen’s foot. And at that moment, Yunmen was greatly enlightened.

https://emptysqua.re/blog/the-day-yunmen-broke-his-foot/

I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.

I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.

I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it, within a year or two I might be able to have enough license revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at that point??)