Ikigai

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 engineers1 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 year2 (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 News3 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 Mastodon4 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 blog5 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 concept6, mentioned my fork of isomorphic-git that’s now Deno‑native, and so on…meanwhile, my other project Nickel7, 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.