When weekends stop being a concept
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I go back and forth between freelance engineering work and my own projects. It's been a while since I went independent, and lately my sense of the day has gotten a little strange.
Morning, afternoon, evening — I'm not always sure which one it is.
I'm coding on several projects at once, a 3D printer is rattling away next to me, and Slack pings me about a client thing. That goes on all day, and at some point I glance through the curtains and notice: oh, the sun is already down.
Weekends, national holidays, Golden Week — the concepts obviously still exist, but they've quietly gone from my life.
Back when I was an employee, the salary just landed in my account no matter what, and it almost never went down. Looking back now, that stability is amazing. At the time I thought it was just how things were.
Once I went independent, no work means no income. If I rest, I just don't get anything.
If you stay in that mode long enough, you start to feel like every hour you're not working is a loss against your life. That's how a worn-out hard worker gets made.
The gap between the world covered by labor law and the world that isn't — once you actually cross over, it's pretty stark.
Most of what I live on right now comes from freelance engineering. In a busy month, my income is higher than it was as an employee. But when I tilt toward my own projects and just sink into building things, there are months where my revenue is literally zero.
There was a stretch where I sat there watching my bank balance drop. That was, predictably, not great for my mental health.
There's a strange thing where money anxiety and dissatisfaction with what I'm making run roughly inverse to each other. When I'm busy, the money worry is gone, but the "I'm not making anything" feeling slowly builds up, and that gets pretty heavy. When I tilt toward my own work, the building is going fine, but my savings start melting away.
Both my wife and I are like this, so there's no safety net at all. It would have been nice if at least one of us were stable, but we're each doing what we love, so it is what it is.
What happens long term? Honestly, I have no idea.
In an AI era where nobody can really predict the future, a corporate salary isn't safe either, and probably nobody on the planet knows where any of this is going. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm sitting in the front row to take the hit.
Programming has basically been swallowed by AI at this point. I genuinely liked the slower era of writing code by hand and, if I could, I'd go back — but I don't think that's reversible. And in this era, choosing not to use AI for programming isn't really realistic, both for business and security reasons.
Meanwhile, the person working next to me — my wife — is an illustrator, currently in the thick of preparing for Design Festa. The popular framing is that illustrators are the most threatened by AI, but watching from a meter away, it really doesn't feel that way. If anything, that side looks pretty fine.
A modern illustrator's business is, in a way, an influence-as-asset thing. As long as someone's drawings have fans, the business keeps turning.
Programming, sadly, is different — writing good code doesn't earn you fans. Just make it work, make it fast, make it cheap. From that angle, of course it gets eaten by AI. That's just the logical outcome.
Sad, though.
That said, this is the story of programmer-as-profession. Building my own apps, I think, is closer to that illustrator picture — who made it and how still carries weight there. The profession of "programmer" may be disappearing, but the place for "people who make things" still seems to be somewhere else.
I'm in the front row to take the hit, sure. But maybe I'm also in the front row to catch the next wind.
I don't know if it's morning, noon, or night. No weekends. Working all the time. Even so, this is, honestly, the most fun stretch of life I've had so far.
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