Life is wasting my time.
Lately I've been struggling with a constant feeling that there is 'something else' I am supposed to be doing. If I wasn't doing this, I'd be doing something awesome.
As it turns out, I think it's a direct flow on from my pride.
The way anyone else does some (most) things drives me insane, it's always too slow, too short-sighted, not solving the real problem or whatever. It makes my life hard, because I'm wasting time writing and re-writing another paragraph of code to solve the same problem I have solved millions of times in as many un-extendible anti-patterns which kind of worked for that tiny little subset of a problem. And it's all your fault!
That situation isn't great, but it's pretty normal in any contract or employment situation.
I am abnormally upset by it.
The advice I have been given and never taken is to 'let go' or be a mercenary about it.' It's not your project', 'do your best and the outcome will be however it is'. It's great advice, and it helps somewhat, but that's not what's going on here.
Even if I didn't care about the project, it's still wasting my time working on it. I should be building amazing things, not getting bogged down in someone else's bad decision making.
And if only it were just to do with code: The public transport system sucks because it delays me doing awesome things. Family time bores me because I could otherwise be doing amazing things. 'Doing Nothing' for a day confuses me, because I should be doing amazing things.
If you are wrong about something, and I have to waste my time telling you why and how wrong you are, you are taking away my precious, precious time.
That's all good and well, except have nothing better to be doing.
I don't have a product idea. I don't have some amazing new framework which solves every open source developer's problem. And even if I did, it's probably not more important than whatever I'm doing. I imagine I would be bored in meetings about the project because I should be building it. Bored building it because I should be building the next bit, the REAL bit, or hiring other people to build it. Bored hiring because they should already be hired and I should already be lecturing them about how my project works. Bored lecturing them because they should already know. Bored waiting for them because they should have already built it, Bored selling it because it should already have gone viral, Bored collecting the money because I should already be retired, and Bored in retirement because I should have already died.
I think the next little problem I solve will occur slightly differently to me. Then I'm going to the beach with my partner to 'do nothing' for an evening.