I identify with, and am seeking for myself, a lot of things described here. That said, the author is speaking from an intensely privileged point of view. Referring to selling one's time as a programmer as 'whoring' caused me to cringe. I have strong aversion to growth for growth's sake now that I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley and the startups that go with it (I was CTO at a nutrition startup). Things I've don…
Let me explain differently by saying that when I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get paid to program. I loved to code, and I needed to get paid — professional coding was the obvious answer.
The problem was that by my mid-20s I was really sad all of the time, and my work was at the root of it. I was programming and getting paid, yet the more work I did the worse I felt. I thought I had fallen out of love with coding.
One day it hit me like a lightning bolt: the reason you do something directly impacts whether you enjoy doing it.
Being a prostitute seems like it would be awesome. You get laid constantly and people throw money at you, right? Well, only if you ignore that you don't have any control of who, when, how, why or where in many cases. Awesome becomes terrible.
I get the same joy from coding that a painter gets from painting. A painter that can paint what, when, how, why and where they want is likely happy. A painter that has to paint what other people want on a schedule is often just struggling to pay the rent. They develop a toxic relationship with their art, and that's sad.
So yeah, I have had some great programming clients and worked on some really interesting code projects for money, but in the end it wasn't worth the sadness that my body was literally fighting back against. I was fat and sick all of the time, everything seemed like it was getting worse. I was disconnected from the chi.
However you want to describe it, everything started getting better as soon as I stopped doing it for other people.