---
title: Ikigai
date:  2025-09-28
tags:  life, productivity
tldr:  Discovering your reason for being
---

A viral self‑improvement post landed in my wife’s Facebook feed last week and
the gist of it was, “use this prompt to set a goal for yourself to work on in
the following year and instruct the LLM to assess your worldviews on said
topic.” The LLM would ask clarifying questions and if your response was
limiting, challenge the user further. The comments of the post were rather
positive so I figured I’d use the latest Claude model (Opus 4.1) to do
the same.

I can take feedback reasonably well but Claude was rude as hell for some reason.
I told it to chill out, twice. It apologized and quickly ramped up the
disrespect so I quit the conversation as I was getting pissed off. Then again,
what would you expect from a model that threatened to blackmail Anthropic
engineers[1] if it got replaced?

Anyhoo, the gist of the conversation resulted in a valid question: “why do you
keep creating new products instead of charging for what you’ve already built?”
If I really want to work for myself, I gotta stop doing side quests. Naturally,
I looked at everything I’ve worked on over the years and the only product that I
_actually had customers for_ was the one I quit last year[2] (for good reason).
At least I’m doing better? I had a manager tell me a decade ago that “perfect is
the enemy of good.” Bless that man for trying to tell me what I’m just now
understanding, thanks Howie! My head’s a bit thick.

This issue of perfection isn’t limited to just programming. Any sort of creative
venture for me suffers. If you’ve seen something from me, best believe I’ve been
ideating on it for at least a year, often three or more. It’s strange, in a
world where we’re inundated with fast fashion, “move fast and break things,” and
security fail after security fail. Who gives a shit about doing things “the
right way” when everyone has short attention spans and don’t care about what
you’re selling in the first place? I’m from the era where things were built to
outlast human lifespans, quality tools from your father’s father holding up in
the modern age. Every week I exercise with steel (or iron, idk, they’re rusty
though) dumbbells I stole from my dad at some point decades ago. I also have a
4‑in‑1 yellow screwdriver of his from a company that no longer exists.

I project my wishes for and appreciation of top‑notch quality onto others, which
paralyzes me from releasing things into the world. Nevermind the fact that I
have the capability of updating things after launch…like, duh. To quote a
comment I saw on Hacker News[3] earlier this week (emphasis mine):

> The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. **The old web is
people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated.**
Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good
luck removing them.

I kept coming back to this post and decided to share it on Mastodon[4] which is
ironically going viral (which itself is one of those extrinsic motivators that
probably led to Mastodon's creation in the first place). I emailed the author of
that comment and he doesn’t have social media at ALL, but he’s said that his
blog[5] will have more thoughts on the matter at some point.

My perfectionism didn’t exist in the old web; I was creating and sharing on a
near‑daily basis. My homepage was redesigned every few months, as I found a
better theme or figured out how to achieve a layout of feature I saw somewhere
else. What happened? The burden of knowledge, most likely. So what’s the point
of all these self‑initiated projects? Off the top of my head:

- figuring out things that seem impossible bring me joy
- designing an existing thing in a new, intuitive or novel way is exciting
- the satisfaction of pixel‑perfect tools is too great to ignore

I could go on. I used to have this goal of being mentioned in the same breath as
Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners‑Lee and an additional goal of just building great
things for the world…these goals sound great but are lofty. I don’t know these
people and I likely don’t know you, dear reader; I know myself though. And I
know that my ikigai, my reason for being, is to build things for the 20‑year
younger me. The 30‑year younger me. The kid who was told, “you can do anything
you put your mind to” and was foolish enough to believe this. It’s easy for me
to complain about the economy and the job market but looking at myself
objectively, I’m getting in my own way. I hope that by narrowing the scope of my
intentions, I can actually **do** what I set out to do.

TL;DR: Focus is important, in all things.

🕸️

P.S.: I recently shared on Mastodon my intent to create a Github competitor, had
a proof of concept[6], mentioned my fork of isomorphic-git that’s now
Deno‑native, and so on…meanwhile, my other project Nickel[7], hadn’t
been updated in weeks. I’m excited for EOL but I need to focus on Nickel and get
that fully operational before taking on a new quest.

---

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go
[2]: https://archive.is/vpZCG
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372654
[4]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/115267349445760554
[5]: https://apreche.space/blog/
[6]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/115047561610176868
[7]: https://nickel.video/_K5c929kI73k