Why I Haven’t Been Building (And What I Noticed Instead) - Asterisk Pound
On stepping away from side projects, finding clarity in physical work, and noticing the tension between what you produce and what you want to be producing.
Why I Haven’t Been Building (And What I Noticed Instead)
It’s been a while since I’ve shipped anything.
No commits worth talking about. No meaningful progress on side projects. No late nights grinding through ideas that felt just out of reach. If you looked at my dev output alone, you’d probably assume I’ve been checked out.
But that’s not actually true.
I’ve been working—just not in the way I’m used to measuring.
Lately, most of my free time has gone into the garden. Physical work. Cutting, hauling, planting, mulching. The kind of work where you can point to something at the end of the day and say, that wasn’t there before.
And honestly? It feels good.
There’s a clarity to it. You do the work, and the system responds. You water something, it grows. You neglect it, it struggles. The feedback loop is tight. Immediate. Honest.
No abstractions. No ambiguity.
Just cause and effect.
The part that doesn’t sit right
Even with all that, there’s been this background tension I can’t ignore.
Because while I’ve been productive in one area, I’ve been completely stalled in another.
I want to build things again. I think about it regularly. Ideas haven’t gone anywhere. If anything, they’ve been stacking up. There’s no shortage of things I could be working on.
But when I actually sit down to do it—when I open the editor, or even just think about starting—I hit this wall.
It’s not dramatic. It’s not some overwhelming dread.
It’s just… heavy.
Like everything requires more effort than it should.
So I don’t push through it. I put my feet up. I doom scroll short videos. I tell myself I’ll come back to it later.
And later doesn’t come.
This isn’t laziness
That’s the easy explanation. It’s also the wrong one.
Because I’m clearly not avoiding effort.
I’ll spend hours outside doing physical labor without hesitation. I’ll take on tasks that are objectively harder, more uncomfortable, and more time-consuming than sitting at a desk.
So the issue isn’t:
“I don’t want to work.”
The issue is more specific:
“I don’t want to do that kind of work right now.”
That distinction matters.
Two different types of output
What I’ve started noticing is that not all work feels the same, even if the end goal is similar.
In the garden:
- the work is visible
- the next step is obvious
- progress is tangible
- feedback is immediate
In development:
- the work is abstract
- the next step is often unclear
- progress is delayed
- feedback is indirect
Both are “building.” But they don’t feel remotely the same.
One pulls me in. The other requires me to push myself just to begin.
The guilt loop
Here’s where it gets interesting—and a little frustrating.
Even though I’ve been productive, there’s still this low-level guilt hanging around.
Not because I’m doing nothing.
But because I’m not doing what I think I should be doing.
That creates this loop:
- I think about working on a project
- I don’t do it
- I feel like I’m falling behind
- That makes the next attempt feel heavier
- So I avoid it again
It’s subtle, but it compounds over time.
The longer I go without touching a project, the harder it feels to return to it.
A different kind of question
For a while, I kept framing this as a motivation problem.
“Why can’t I just sit down and do the work?”
But that question hasn’t been very useful.
A better question might be:
If I’m clearly capable of working hard, why does this specific kind of work feel harder than it should?
Because that points to something deeper than discipline.
It points to differences in:
- how feedback works
- how effort is perceived
- how quickly progress is visible
- how clearly the next step is defined
In other words, it might not be about motivation at all.
It might be about the system I’m trying to operate in.
Where I’m at right now
I don’t have a clean answer yet.
I haven’t “fixed” anything.
I’m still not building at the pace I’d like to be.
But I’ve stopped pretending that nothing is happening.
Something is happening.
My output shifted. My energy shifted. The type of work I’m drawn to shifted.
And instead of forcing it back to what it was, I’m trying to understand why.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from building systems—whether in code or in the real world—it’s this:
If a system keeps producing the same result, it’s not random.
It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The question is whether I built it that way on purpose.
Or whether I trained it without realizing it.
That’s what I’m trying to figure out next.