The many forms of past-time passions

I’ve written before about my passion for programming, and my love of programming languages. But I’ve been thinking lately about what drives someone on, in the context of a passion project. If you’re a lover of games, perhaps your passion project is to win as the Celts in Civilization 4. Or if you love Game of Thrones, maybe your passion project is to write lengthy forum posts justifying your head cannon. These typically wouldn’t fall under the description “passion project”, but rather an interest or a hobby. I’ve come to realize that there is a large overlap between my nerdy interests that involve creation of something new, and my nerdy interests of consuming that which was already made for me.

To feed a passion, you must dive right into the topic: if it’s a game, you’ll spend hours playing it or watching lets plays. If it’s a TV show, you’ll watch all the episodes and cast interviews. It’s also important to consider that not all content about a passion needs to be consumed, just enough to scratch the itch. When it comes to programming, I see the pattern emerge in so many different ways: some will make games but drop them before even an alpha build. Some will make an open source library but then not write a README. It’s only natural that if you have a few hobbies, that the energy you have for consumption and creation is limited between each hobby.

How do you justify spending a certain amount of time on one interest and not on the other? Well, for most things, it’s entirely up to you since really it’s your happiness that comes into question. Until various social contracts come into play, like “hey feed your family”. But when you’ve given life to a creation that now others will use and enjoy, suddenly you start having dependants - people who expect things from you, because you, as creator, are the person in the best position to provide what they want. These interactions can turn something you love into something you feel contractually obliged to complete: it is now a chore rather than a passion.

To counter that feeling when I’m working on open source, I try to keep my own dedicated list of priorities. I have a backlog of issues, and will pick up a mixture of things that interest me and bugs that need fixing. If what interests me is writing self-bootstrapping compiler code, then that’s what I’m going to work on when I want to do something I love. In the act of creating something consumable, you should spend time serving your users - or they will abandon what you created, either out of disappointment or frustration. But what I’ve come to see is that this form of serving others doesn’t have to be a chore, but instead a passion itself. I find it very enjoyable to help others learn or achieve things, and that’s rewarding just as much as doing clever things with code. The truth to spare-time based passions is probably along the lines of “if it makes you happy, do it”, and understanding that is a combination of self-reflection and self-awareness.