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+Document: WM-075                                                 P. Webb
+Category: Life                                                2025.09.28
+
+                                 Ikigai
+
+Abstract
+
+   Discovering your reason for being
+
+Body
+
+   A viral self‑improvement post landed in my wife’s Facebook feed last
+   week and the gist of it was, “use this prompt to set a goal for
+   yourself to work on in the following year and instruct the LLM to
+   assess your worldviews on said topic.” The LLM would ask clarifying
+   questions and if your response was limiting, challenge the user
+   further. The comments of the post were rather positive so I figured
+   I’d use the latest Claude model (Opus 4.1) to do the same.
+
+   I can take feedback reasonably well but Claude was rude as hell for
+   some reason. I told it to chill out, twice. It apologized and quickly
+   ramped up the disrespect so I quit the conversation as I was getting
+   pissed off. Then again, what would you expect from a model that
+   threatened to blackmail Anthropic engineers[1] if it got replaced?
+
+   Anyhoo, the gist of the conversation resulted in a valid question:
+   “why do you keep creating new products instead of charging for what
+   you’ve already built?” If I really want to work for myself, I gotta
+   stop doing side quests. Naturally, I looked at everything I’ve worked
+   on over the years and the only product that I _actually had customers
+   for_ was the one I quit last year[2] (for good reason). At least I’m
+   doing better? I had a manager tell me a decade ago that “perfect is
+   the enemy of good.” Bless that man for trying to tell me what I’m
+   just now understanding, thanks Howie! My head’s a bit thick.
+
+   This issue of perfection isn’t limited to just programming. Any sort
+   of creative venture for me suffers. If you’ve seen something from me,
+   best believe I’ve been ideating on it for at least a year, often
+   three or more. It’s strange, in a world where we’re inundated with
+   fast fashion, “move fast and break things,” and security fail after
+   security fail. Who gives a shit about doing things “the right way”
+   when everyone has short attention spans and don’t care about what
+   you’re selling in the first place? I’m from the era where things were
+   built to outlast human lifespans, quality tools from your father’s
+   father holding up in the modern age. Every week I exercise with steel
+   (or iron, idk, they’re rusty though) dumbbells I stole from my dad at
+   some point decades ago. I also have a 4‑in‑1 yellow screwdriver of
+   his from a company that no longer exists.
+
+   I project my wishes for and appreciation of top‑notch quality onto
+   others, which paralyzes me from releasing things into the world.
+   Nevermind the fact that I have the capability of updating things
+   after launch…like, duh. To quote a comment I saw on Hacker News[3]
+   earlier this week (emphasis mine):
+
+   > The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. **The
+   > old web is people creating and sharing because they are
+   > intrinsically motivated.** Everything we hate about the current web
+   > comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
+
+   I kept coming back to this post and decided to share it on
+   Mastodon[4] which is ironically going viral (which itself is one of
+   those extrinsic motivators that probably led to Mastodon’s creation
+   in the first place). I emailed the author of that comment and he
+   doesn’t have social media at ALL, but he’s said that his blog[5] will
+   have more thoughts on the matter at some point.
+
+   My perfectionism didn’t exist in the old web; I was creating and
+   sharing on a near‑daily basis. My homepage was redesigned every few
+   months, as I found a better theme or figured out how to achieve a
+   layout of feature I saw somewhere else. What happened? The burden of
+   knowledge, most likely. So what’s the point of all these
+   self‑initiated projects? Off the top of my head:
+
+   - figuring out things that seem impossible bring me joy
+   - designing an existing thing in a new, intuitive or novel way
+     is exciting
+   - the satisfaction of pixel‑perfect tools is too great to ignore
+
+   I could go on. I used to have this goal of being mentioned in the
+   same breath as Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners‑Lee and an additional
+   goal of just building great things for the world…these goals sound
+   great but are lofty. I don’t know these people and I likely don’t
+   know you, dear reader; I know myself though. And I know that my
+   ikigai, my reason for being, is to build things for the 20‑year
+   younger me. The 30‑year younger me. The kid who was told, “you can do
+   anything you put your mind to” and was foolish enough to believe
+   this. It’s easy for me to complain about the economy and the job
+   market but looking at myself objectively, I’m getting in my own way.
+   I hope that by narrowing the scope of my intentions, I can actually
+   **do** what I set out to do.
+
+   TL;DR: Focus is important, in all things.
+
+   🕸️
+
+   P.S.: I recently shared on Mastodon my intent to create a Github
+   competitor, had a proof of concept[6], mentioned my fork of
+   isomorphic-git that’s now Deno‑native, and so on…meanwhile, my other
+   project Nickel[7], hadn’t been updated in weeks. I’m excited for EOL
+   but I need to focus on Nickel and get that fully operational before
+   taking on a new quest.
+
+References
+
+   [1] <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go>
+   [2] <https://archive.is/vpZCG>
+   [3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372654>
+   [4] <https://social.coop/@netopwibby/115267349445760554>
+   [5] <https://apreche.space/blog/>
+   [6] <https://social.coop/@netopwibby/115047561610176868>
+   [7] <https://nickel.video/_K5c929kI73k>