These last few days I kept asking myself one question. #1 What am I actually doing in my free time?
My son is one year old.
When I am with him, I get on the floor. I talk to him. I laugh with him. I make the noises he is learning to make. I try to be one year old again with him.
The laptop is closed. I am not typing. But I am still thinking about work.
A thread from the afternoon. A decision that can wait until tomorrow. Count those minutes and I am working past the hours the job asks for.
Even when I am not working, I am still at work.
I tried to stop
I know what I want that hour for.
My son.
My wife.
My parents.
The room I am actually in.
I tried, on purpose, to stop. It got worse. Work, then work again.
I have named this wrong before. In I hated sports I called anxiety boredom for years. This time I called it discipline. That is not the name.
In 1987, a white-bear study by Daniel Wegner showed the trap. People told not to think of a bear thought of it more.
“Do not think about work” is still thinking about work.
So I asked a better question. #2 Why does my mind pick the job every time the room goes quiet?
Nothing else was important enough
This is what I found.
I keep thinking about work in my free time because I do not have anything else important enough to think about.
Work has a next step. My free time has been whatever is left. The quiet hour fills with the one thing I have treated as serious. For a long time, that has been the job.
William James wrote, in 1890, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
I had never chosen anything else, so work kept the evening.
I keep thinking about work because nothing else is important enough to think about.
I am keeping the writing. I am not starting the company.
I have wanted to write for a long time. Now I do it in public.
In Amazon title didn’t change. Project scope did. I said the page is where I find out what I think. That is still why.
More than a hundred of you subscribe. I want that to become a thousand. Not because I want a bigger number on a screen.
Because more people means more replies, more comments, and more collaboration. And that is how I get to help people directly, not only in my own head.
In college I wanted my own company. There was no product. Only the want. I am not starting it.
Building is cheap now. Someone can tell an agent to make the app, and it can be up in minutes, hours, or days.
Then a copy shows up. They fight for the same users. The one with the funding covers the market.
In March 2025, Y Combinator said about a quarter of its winter batch had codebases roughly 95 percent written by AI.
I am still optimistic about the tools. I wrote why I am optimistic about AI, and a task that used to take me two days can come back in an afternoon.
“We built it” is just no longer a business.
Open source is the same race. The expensive company has to cut the price and the people, and some shut down.
OpenSearch, OpenTofu, and Valkey are already that fight. Producing the thing got fast, as I wrote in Amazon’s software engineer job quietly changed. Deciding what should exist did not.
I do not want a decade whose prize is a lower price.
The hour that gives the energy back
#3 What is important enough that my mind would hold it instead of the job? I do not have the full answer. I have a clue.
When a friend calls about what is stuck, and I can help, I hang up more alive than I was before I picked up.
I have seen that at work. In There are only two ways work gets done, the good teams send you home with more energy than you brought.
Pressure ships the date. Helping gives the hour back.
After the call, I feel more alive than I did before it started.
In 2022, Yuzvendra Chahal said Rahul Dravid tells him, when the over is hard, “Yuzi just back your strengths, we trust you.”
Helping is that strength. I am doubling down on it.
One place is this page. If you are stuck, reply. That email is the call.
The other is a path I have already published. It has not moved. SDE II, then SDE III, then Software Development Manager. I said why in To grow, I had to forget how I used to work.
That job is people and the product together. The code still matters. Someone else’s growth is the part I want more of.
Final: Step back, or the job keeps the evening
The world wants everything faster. Every few days something shocking shows up, then another.
The clock got shorter because leaders believed the tools made us faster. Some of that speed is real. The pressure is bigger.
When the world pushes us to go faster, we need to step back and see what we are actually doing.
With my son, the step is simple. Floor. Talk. Laugh. Make the noises.
If my mind is at the office, I missed him, even while looking at him. He is one. This year does not run again.
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