I learned to code sometime in 2011. I started getting paid to code in 2016.

What started out as a passion turned into a job. This sometimes leads to what’s called the overjustification effect.

The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform a task. Overjustification is an explanation for the phenomenon known as motivational “crowding out”. The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.¹

Despite being paid to write code for the past several years now, I’m still in love with it.

Although my relationship to my passion has changed over time. I work full-time as a software engineer and so at the end of the day I’m, usually, “all coded out”.

That’s not always the case though. In the past few months, I’ve worked on a mod for the criminally underappreciated game Pig Eat Ball, a Discord bot to help some friends and I play the tabletop RPG Everyone Is John and a little web app to explore and share Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

These projects were all small in scope and so I was able to sneak them into my schedule.

These past few years, I noticed that I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on creative projects purely for my own enjoyment.

I write about video games on this blog (worth nothing) and I work on little programming projects for fun (worth nothing to anyone but me).

I wonder if I’m subconsciously going out of my way to work on projects that have no value to anyone but myself because I don’t want to be put in a situation where I’m paid for any of this.

If I start getting paid for my creative output, maybe I’ll stop having as much fun creating it?

“Wasting” my time on creative projects that have no value is a luxury I can afford. My skills as a software engineer are highly sought after and so I’m paid well for the work I do during the day.

I live a life of privilege and I hope I can continue having fun creating unsellable stuff until the day they unceremoniously shove me into the dirt.

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