Document: WM-075                                                 P. Webb
Category: Life                                                2025.09.28

                                 Ikigai

Abstract

   Discovering your reason for being

Body

   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.