I am 53 and have had a sideline for 18 years which makes about a 1/4 of an average salary.
I believe people are meant to have one job, unless poverty or circumstance is driving their financial needs.
If your sideline is not making money consider dropping it.
When you enjoy something like programming, and people giving you positive feedback, you don't sometimes consider the bigger questions. Am I happy? What am I doing with my life and relationships?
A sideline worked for me as it has made hundreds of thousands and changed my family's life.
If yours is a hobby, consider stopping it, and see if it comes back to you down the line.
Jennifer Senior wrote a great piece back in 2006 about burnout [1] titled "Can’t Get No Satisfaction". It's worth reading the whole thing. Here are some fragments that stuck with me:
> we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards
> happiness equals reality divided by expectations
> level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results
How have you been framing your side project? Is your side project intended to be a business? If so, what outputs is the business achieving (revenue, profit, your effective hourly wage as the owner operator)? Dispassionately, is it doing well enough commercially that it makes sense to continue to pursue this business?
In the case where this side project has not been achieving sufficient commercial results, and has been falling short of your expectations and the goals you set yourself, is it possible that your resistance to continuing working on the side project is because subconsciously your body has decided it is not a good use of additional time and energy?
It could be beneficial and healthy if you could give yourself a long break from thinking and focusing on your side project, to get your brain out of this habit of focusing on the side project and give it the opportunity to think and focus on some new things, or just to rest.
From my experience (not with side projects but with job related burnout) consider taking a holiday from it, get lots of sunlight and exercise, spend time with friends and family, pick up a new hobby or resume an old hobby that gives you some immediate enjoyment in the moment. It may take months for your habitual thinking patterns to adjust, but once your thinking patterns change you may have a very different perspective on the situation.
I have a brilliant phrase for you, it's called a baggage without a handle. It's hard to carry it with you and it's a shame to throw it away.
I was in very very similar situation and just put the lights off. You can't trick your brain to do hard work for free. Why spend your time working on something that unsuccessful when you can work on something that you actually like?
1) "I even created detailed plans for easy to build features that users requested"
2) "I know exactly what to build and how to build it"
You seem to have a nice specification of what you want to build and how. Unfortunately, you feel burned out. Thus, one option is to try to leverage LLM by feeding your well-defined specifications and then revising them.
I'm thinking you need a therapist more than you need HN. I've been in the software development business for 40 years and I've never once heard of anyone being afflicted with this problem. Maybe a therapist could also help you stop freezing up when you sit at your computer to work on your project?
What he's describing are fairly typical symptoms of depression, including the freezing. Not rare at all. I agree that he should seek some real assistance with it, but he's not at all some kind of outlier.
Mine is only an anecdote. I've been in this business for decades and I've never seen or even heard of anything like this. Even so, I think we agree a therapist would be really good for him to get over this patch.
I am 53 and have had a sideline for 18 years which makes about a 1/4 of an average salary.
I believe people are meant to have one job, unless poverty or circumstance is driving their financial needs.
If your sideline is not making money consider dropping it.
When you enjoy something like programming, and people giving you positive feedback, you don't sometimes consider the bigger questions. Am I happy? What am I doing with my life and relationships?
A sideline worked for me as it has made hundreds of thousands and changed my family's life.
If yours is a hobby, consider stopping it, and see if it comes back to you down the line.
Jennifer Senior wrote a great piece back in 2006 about burnout [1] titled "Can’t Get No Satisfaction". It's worth reading the whole thing. Here are some fragments that stuck with me:
> we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards
> happiness equals reality divided by expectations
> level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results
How have you been framing your side project? Is your side project intended to be a business? If so, what outputs is the business achieving (revenue, profit, your effective hourly wage as the owner operator)? Dispassionately, is it doing well enough commercially that it makes sense to continue to pursue this business?
In the case where this side project has not been achieving sufficient commercial results, and has been falling short of your expectations and the goals you set yourself, is it possible that your resistance to continuing working on the side project is because subconsciously your body has decided it is not a good use of additional time and energy?
It could be beneficial and healthy if you could give yourself a long break from thinking and focusing on your side project, to get your brain out of this habit of focusing on the side project and give it the opportunity to think and focus on some new things, or just to rest.
From my experience (not with side projects but with job related burnout) consider taking a holiday from it, get lots of sunlight and exercise, spend time with friends and family, pick up a new hobby or resume an old hobby that gives you some immediate enjoyment in the moment. It may take months for your habitual thinking patterns to adjust, but once your thinking patterns change you may have a very different perspective on the situation.
[1] https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/
I have a brilliant phrase for you, it's called a baggage without a handle. It's hard to carry it with you and it's a shame to throw it away.
I was in very very similar situation and just put the lights off. You can't trick your brain to do hard work for free. Why spend your time working on something that unsuccessful when you can work on something that you actually like?
1) "I even created detailed plans for easy to build features that users requested" 2) "I know exactly what to build and how to build it"
You seem to have a nice specification of what you want to build and how. Unfortunately, you feel burned out. Thus, one option is to try to leverage LLM by feeding your well-defined specifications and then revising them.
I believe this can help you make progress.
I'm thinking you need a therapist more than you need HN. I've been in the software development business for 40 years and I've never once heard of anyone being afflicted with this problem. Maybe a therapist could also help you stop freezing up when you sit at your computer to work on your project?
What he's describing are fairly typical symptoms of depression, including the freezing. Not rare at all. I agree that he should seek some real assistance with it, but he's not at all some kind of outlier.
Mine is only an anecdote. I've been in this business for decades and I've never seen or even heard of anything like this. Even so, I think we agree a therapist would be really good for him to get over this patch.