Some evenings I open my laptop with this weird feeling that I should be building something. Not a specific thing. Just something. It's restless and a little anxious, like I'm wasting time by not using the time.
I open GitHub, Reddit or whatever. I browse trending repos. I scroll HackerNews looking for a project that makes me think "Damn, I wish I had that idea." Usually nothing clicks. An hour passes. I close my laptop having written zero lines of code.
The anxiety underneath it is about falling behind. Someone at work mentions a tool I've never heard of. AI apocalypse is rising and I see engineers debating tradeoffs of something I've never touched. I look at a job posting and recognize maybe half the stack. And even then. For the job, you most likely need 20 years of experience by the age of 20. The field is large, and I have the persistent sense that the parts I don't know are exactly the parts that are becoming important.
The obvious response is: you can't know everything, focus on depth. I know. I've said it to other people. It doesn't help, because the feeling isn't really about logic. It's about visibility.
I can see what other people know or at least what they talk about publicly. I can't see their gaps. So the comparison is always between their visible strengths and my visible gaps, and that math will never be mathing.
The social browsing is an attempt to solve the problem, but it's solving the wrong problem. I don't need a project to feel legitimate. What I'm actually looking for is the feeling of making progress. A new tutorial gives you that for a few hours. You're learning something. Maybe. But then, it runs out and the repo sits at 30% and you're back to the same restless evening.
The times I actually feel good about my work aren't the times I've been most productive in the abstract. They're when I've been solving something with real difficulty. Like a bug I couldn't figure out for two days and even Claude was struggling. A design decision that turned out to be harder than it looked. Those don't feel like falling behind. They feel like the job.
But they're not available on demand. Real problems show up at inconvenient times. Free time shows up on Tuesday evenings, untethered from any actual problem.
The advice is always "scratch your own itch." Which is actually dumb, because if I had an itch I'd already be scratching it. The whole problem is that I don't have one.
What I keep coming back to is that the anxious browsing is probably the wrong response, and doing nothing might actually be fine. Not every free evening needs to produce output. The urge to code without a destination might just be boredom wearing a productive costume.
That's easy to say. It's hard to believe at 9pm when someone at work knows things I've never heard of. Even the comparison itself might be the problem. But I'm increasingly suspicious that the discomfort isn't a signal to act. It's just discomfort. And writing this post is the most productive thing I've done with it.