Time After Capitalism

A large part of what makes hobbies enjoyable is that, freed from the profit motive, practitioners work at the pace they choose, allowing them to experiment, mess up, quit, and start over.

My coworkers make fun of me in a good-natured way because, on many days, I get done working a full day writing and reviewing JavaScript and then I spend the evening learning Haskell for fun. I think this quote explains something important about why.

At work, I have project managers, bosses, and deadlines, and honestly, those factors are detrimental to my growth as a programmer and my enjoyment of what I do. At home, I have time to fuck around and really learn how something works on a fundamental level. I don’t want to just be able to use functional programming techniques to make something someone else told me to make; I want to fully grok monads, lambda calculus, abstract algebra, and how set theory models otherwise complex ideas. If I don’t truly grok that shit, it makes me feel rather like a primitive homonid randomly banging rocks together. Occasionally, I may make sparks, but I’m not truly progressing.

I would program computers for fun even if no one paid me to do so. For me, learning new concepts and building digital artifacts with those concepts are sources of profound joy. When the revolution comes, just give me a shitty laptop with Linux on it, and I’ll keep myself entertained and educated until my death. And who knows what I might make without authoritarian bullshit interfering.

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Time After Capitalism by Miya Tokumitsu