A colleague responded with Yes I am doing Advent of Code by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning). He wrote,

“Have you heard of Inktober? In short, it’s a drawing challenge where you draw in ink based on a prompt every day of October. You don’t win anything. There’s no cool badge. It’s just fun and a challenge (try to draw something subverting 31 days in a row). I really enjoy to break out my pen and pad and render some ideas.”

I wrote him back,

Sounds like you’re doing it for the right reason.

I agree with what you wrote. Everything I do is also for fun, as well. It’s why I’m kind of bad at adulting. How does my pension look? What? I’ve not got time for that! I’m writing about injustice in Syria! I’m reading about syntax differences between OCaml and Haskell! Ask my wife; she’s the only one who knows how to log on to our online banking anyway.

I’m mystified by posts that talk about “driving engagement” to personal web sites. Why would you do that? Don’t monetize everything you do for fun! Because then you can’t pick and choose when to do it! And then … it stops being fun.

Influencers know what I’m talking about.

I’m lucky in that my job is also mostly fun.

When I switched jobs to Uster a few years back, I went from almost 100% software-engineering, programming, systems design, architecture to … none of that at first. But I was still enjoying the hell out of my job.

How?

I realized that, although I’d looked for a job for programming, what I really found to be fun is problem-solving.

That, and also recognition and acknowledgement that what I was doing was appreciated and useful. That helped a lot … and had been nearly completely lacking at my own company.

Huh. I started off with the best of intentions not to write too much, in the hopes that I wouldn’t appear to be trying to overshadow your lovely message and yet here we are.