Create for the sake of creation

Published Jan 14, 2026

Tags: burnout mental health opinion programming

I enjoy software development and technology but every single time I’ve hopped into my IDE, I always leave frustrated and unaccomplished. This pattern has been going on for several months until very recently, when what little energy I had completely fell and ever since that, I haven’t been accomplishing any work at all. This entire cycle and the hell it unleashes on its victims isn’t that uncommon, you most likely know it by the more popular term: burnout.

I am not a psychiatrist, nor a psychologist, nor an any other kind of mental health expert, I am just a human but (and please forgive me, this is going to sound like something straight out of LinkedIn) burnout made me realize something¹ about myself, it made me think about the awful internalized ideas and habits I have.

A bit of background

I come from a poor family, not quite enough poor to starve or freeze but looking at the bills and watching our electricity usage and worrying about whether or not I will be able to achieve success, to pull my family out of our hell, always stressed me out. I liked computers, they were a brief refuge for me from all this stress, and it was a place for me to unwind and just create the stuff I actually enjoy.

I wasn’t the only one who took comfort in computers and technology, there were at minimum tens of thousands of us, we weren’t all poor or struggling or chasing success but a lot of us were, and I was one of many that shared the same comfortable space, but that comfortable space morphed into a hobby, and when you have a hobby, you’re bound to turn it into a job, and when you have a job, you’re bound to turn it into a profession.

The rabbit hole grows and that “profession” idea took hold in my mind, I realized I could maybe achieve success with computers and technology, and it seemed like a no-brainer! “Doing something I love and getting paid for it? SIGN ME UP!” but it all created an unhealthy habit, or to put it into more honest terms: an obsession to achieve fame or money, no matter what.

Everything I ever did was for my own success, at least in the long run. I had to succeed in education, I had to program in my free-time, and the programs I made had to be marketable² so I could start a business off of them and make a lot of money. It all reached a tipping point at around 2021, my mind just really could not get off of the hook of success.

It’s truly hard to actually describe just how toxic that mindset is, I could never relax, I could never take a day off without trying to create something, every small mistake and every hour wasted was like a bit of snow slowly forming into a snowball, slowly growing into an avalanche, and now, years later. It has finally collapsed on me and I can’t do anything anymore.

What happens now?

Nothing, and still nothing for a long time. I desperately tried to get back into the same workflow but my body just refused, every time I opened a new IDE tab, I’d stare at it and accomplish nothing. This only worsened everything and I still really haven’t recovered but, why?

Why and how did I end up this way? Well it was because I put a lot of pressure on myself to achieve success at all costs, but I was doing it to such an irrational and obsessive degree that it only hurt me. Since I couldn’t really do anything at all, I just stood back from the sides and wondered what the hell I’ve been doing with my life.

The biggest worry for me is education, I looked up my “gennemsnit” (average grades) and compared it to the minimum requirements for computer science bachelors at my local university (which was what I wanted to study), and that’s when I realized just how stupid this entire thing was. My grades were worrying but they weren’t horrible and they weren’t as bad as I was making it out to be in my own mind, why did I panic? I could just study and get some subjects³ higher up but there was no need for this nuclear-level obsessiveness.

Same thing for my programming skill and projects, I always used to browse Hacker News and all sorts of project showcase forums and I’d compare my creations to theirs. The truth was that I was actually decent! Sure, there’s always going to be 12 year old geniuses who can do anything they want, though their lives seemed so stressful with all the attention and pressure, but I lived comfortably and I could program pretty well! I wouldn’t put my programs anything near the level of Linus Torvalds or Fabrice Bellard⁴ but again, I was worrying and panicking too much!

So that’s two of my biggest worries currently, and I’ve found evidence that I was acting irrational, that I was already pretty fine and there was no need to panic or obsess. But I still couldn’t program! I was still stuck in the success mindset, that I had to achieve it by all costs, so how do I get back to programming for fun instead of programming for work?

Why do people create?

Why do artists draw? why do writers write? why do musicians compose and is there anything I can take from this? Well, fundamentally, everyone starts off doing the things they love but since we live in a world with resources that must be bought with cash, we also quickly learn to pick a skill for what we want to do to survive.

It sounds so obvious, but to a broken mind like mine, those words were just so reassuring and out of this world. It was as though I could basically hear past me on the other side of the phone, telling me to create for the sake of creation and not for my own sake.

Creating is just a fundamentally fun task, I enjoy writing blog articles because it brings a sense of peace and joy to me that I can find the words to express an idea or a concept⁵, I wanna get back to the same mindset when programming, I don’t wanna think about what could happen to me if the projects become successful, I just wanna create interesting stuff.

Honestly the process from here on out is just kind of boring, when I think about success, I have to catch myself and think back to just how awful that period of burnout is, and to find other reasons to doing what I wanna do. If you’re also kind of struggling with the same thing, here’s a couple of programming ideas alongside the rationale for actually doing them.

1. I wanna write my own markup language, because it sounds fun!
2. I wanna write my own forum software, because the world could use more forums.
3. I have this really specific problem I need to solve, and I could program a tool to do it for me.
4. S-Expressions are really interesting, so why don’t I write  my own Lisp to learn more about it!
5. Writing a digital Christmas card, something like the Merry Quine-mas programs by Yusuke Endoh, would probably brighten a friends day, so why not make one?

I just cut out any premonition or idea of success, because once I start daydreaming, it’s impossible to stop until I burnout. I won’t start a new business, nor will I earn success from writing. I just wanna do what’s actually fun and hopefully everything will seem brighter and happier by comparison.

Oh and the confetti config language  seems pretty interesting, I wonder if I could write a parser for it! That’ll be my first weekend project in a long time now, and I can’t wait for it! Ses!