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This is a reply to a reply:
In essence: "Yup, sounds about right". Don't worry about it. Spend time having fun. I am very passionate about software engineering. I love to do it. But if I'm spending 40 hours building software, I certainly have 0 motivation to spend the few hours I have outside of work doing that...
(literally, you can skip the rest, it's just that statement but more...)
Something that's plagued me for my entire career has been the idea of the hobby project, and helping friends with theirs.
In college, a group of friends ran a fork of an OSS application for our campus. And they asked me for help. My roommate who was involved in it heavily, was a math major with an IT minor. Programming was a very minor aspect of their classwork. For me, a CS major, was the bulk of my time. If not directly writing code, all the heavy lifting that comes with it.
I had no more space in my brain to think about code.
As I aged, this kept coming up. And a lot of what was said in the mentioned gemlogs continued. My brother, no formal programming training, working unrelated jobs, picked up making games as a hobby, and these gemlogs echoed what he's said to me in the past. But I've felt bad for not being able to help more directly because ... I'm tired. But I try to explain this when it comes up: "It's not that your job isn't also tiring. It's just that all the energy I could devote to software was spent at work. It's not a lack of passion or want"
Now, if I were to list my software passions - it's be debugging, designing (systems), writing code. So when he has a problem, especially, when it involves dipping into the deep end, I love getting some stack trace, compiler error, or error message and doing some debugging. mm! So fun. But rare instances, and motivated by kindness.
Now I said a lot. For those who don't know me. I've been a software engineer for 10 years with a degree in CS. For half my life now about I've been developing software as my primary job. ((School + career) ~14-15 years, I'm in my early 30s... fuzzy math). Computers and technology has always been one my biggest passions. I've spoken in other gemlogs about this, spending literally my entire life behind a glowing screen. But it's not my only passion... Heck, I don't think software is even my biggest passion.
So when my day looks like "wake up, coffee, software, dinner, [free]". I don't want to fill the free time with "software". I want to fill it with fun. And for me at least. After spending the day getting stressed out at work about software, it's the last thing I want to do. I have other hobbies.
I can spend time in the passions talk in another gemlog. But I'll leave with a statement:
> Work is exhausting. Spend your free time having fun. Whatever is fun FOR YOU.
// authored at 5am after I couldn't get back to sleep
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