To the outside observer it can all seem like "work" but to the code artist.. some percentage of it is indeed drudgery but another (hopefully larger) percentage of it is "creative play" using an artistic medium that the master painters and scribes of antiquity would have traded an arm for.

For me the problems arise when money enters the equation because then you find reasons to set aside your vision of a masterpiece so you can hurry up and ship your your "Minimal Viable Product". You do make a good point though about the "addictive quality" of shiny boxes. I leverage meditation to help me "decompress" rapidly on the occasions when I do end up overworking.

Sol Robeson: Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see? You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery.

Sol Robeson: Now, what is the moral of the story?

Maximillian Cohen: That a breakthrough will come.

Sol Robeson: Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective, meaning. You need a break, you have to take a bath or you will get nowhere.

I hear ya I really do. I'm one of those "single professionals". I agree that it's tough, but I don't think that you necessarily need to found a company yourself to break out of the so called "terrible job" funk, all you need is to be an early employee with equity at a startup that doesn't fail. That means you do have to take risks (even work for equity sometimes) but there are a wide variety of risk profiles to choose from and you definitely can find success in this industry without having to have created a business yourself.

I also don't believe that there's a glut of disciplined creative talent at least not when it comes to individuals who have experience contributing to production quality web applications or open source software. The more of this requisite experience you have, the easier it is for you to interview at interesting startups, pick a winner, and end up with a valuable equity position in a real company. Some people manage to do this all while engaging in "creative play" a huge percentage of the time.

I do however agree with you that the game is stacked to the advantage of those who already have a lot of free time no matter whether that be because they're independently wealthy or because they've opted to not pursue the family life. I don't think of that as ageism per say I think it's something different that looks like ageism because young people have more free time.

I suppose that's the thing really.. why are you into this business in the first place ? Are you in it because you enjoy playing with information technology most of the time or are you in it as a way to get paid to finance a wife and kids ? For me the answer is clear: I'm doing this because I love playing with the technology. To me it's a lot like building glorious lego structures, building robots, remote control cars, model rockets, and all of that other fun "legacy" stuff that I used to enjoy working on as a kid. I used to always dream about getting paid to do that kind of thing one day, and I feel like that's what I have the opportunity to do now with web startup work.

In other words I made the conscious decision to optimize my life for immersion into that kind of play rather than to optimize it to suit a family life because that's what I wanted to do. In other words I was a geek before it was chic and I had long since decided that I was OK with staying that way.

Sure I suppose it would be nice to have my cake and eat it too (have a family), and if I was a millionaire that might be realistic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJTRZI2HThU) , but I don't feel like I have to become a millionaire just to push back against some fear of "dying alone".

As for being a slave to debt, yea that does suck, and I have no quick fix for that, but I will point out that this problem is pervasive and that fewer and fewer industries offer career paths where you can have any real lasting job security. Welcome to the globalized era. I'm not saying it's a good thing I'm just saying that appears to be how it is right now.

My point is merely that some of us enjoy this kind of work because it really can be creative, as in you're birthing new things into the world that didn't exist before and which could turn into things beyond what you imagined them to be when you first started. To me it's that sense of exploration and experimentation that makes software development fun. I am biased towards thinking this kind of work is fun and viewing it as play, and viewing life in the same way. This was not all that different in the past. If you look at say the renaissance period in Europe you'll notice there were classes of artisans, craftsmen, and alchemists who were also optimizing for this kind of play over the pursuit of family life as their highest ideal. Some things of these things don't often change