I’m on the floor again, building things nobody asked for.
This time, nobody calls me for dinner.
When I was a kid, I could sit on the floor for hours building Lego while TKKG played in the background.
I don’t remember trying to concentrate. I just disappeared.
One brick suggested the next. A wall needed a window. The window suddenly needed a second floor. Somewhere along the way, a whole world appeared on the carpet even though I had never decided what I was building.
I think that was part of the fun.
The next brick was enough. Then the next one. The rules held everything together while leaving enough room to surprise myself.
There’s one part of that memory I can’t really see.
How did I stop?
I assume someone eventually called me for dinner. Bedtime arrived. The carpet belonged to a room inside a house, and the house kept providing edges I never had to create myself.
For the past few months, work has felt like that again.
At first I treated it as a good week. In my weekly review I wrote: “I worked while I played.”
The next week: “the maintenance kinda WAS the play.”
Then: “I played a lot and created a lot.”
Then I wrote almost the same sentence again.
By now, I have to admit that something has shifted.
By now, the repetition means something else.
Come look at the castle
I built a weekly experimental newspaper that searches outside my usual interests, pulls together things from architecture, biology, history, film and food, typesets itself, draws a little picture of my week and waits for me on Sunday morning.
I built a paper-doll version of my own head that dresses for the actual weather, mostly so I know whether I can take the scooter without getting soaked.
I built an outreach machine that researches a brand, writes the read and sends the mail, with a small interface so someone else can run it for me.
There were more. A 90-day marketing strategy with the execution plan attached. 2 full-funnel paid performance builds. Client dashboards, a memory system, this site.
I stopped keeping track.
Some of it was paid work. That’s the part I still can’t place. The same afternoon produced the toy and the invoice.
Writing that list makes me slightly uncomfortable because it sounds like showing off.
Maybe it is.
When I finished a Lego castle as a kid, I also wanted someone to come into the room and look at it. Delight seems to want a witness.
Look what I built.
I had so much fun.
That’s the feeling underneath the last few months. None of it felt like work. The output is real, but it arrives the way bricks arrive after a good afternoon on the carpet: I was following the next one, and then the castle was just there.
The weather head is probably the purest example. It has a tiny practical purpose and absolutely no reason to exist in its current form. A weather app would have worked. Apparently I needed my own face to put on a little rain jacket.
Every castle leaves a few loose bricks in my head.
The newspaper becomes a generator I can tune. The outreach machine needs gates, training and upkeep. A small internal tool becomes something I can improve, connect or rebuild. Finished means it works. Finished rarely means there’s nothing else I could attach.
The weather head is still a toy. I love it.
It also lives inside a larger system that checks the forecast, generates the card and sends it somewhere useful. The silly little rain jacket arrives with infrastructure.
That’s what makes the feeling difficult to read. The things are good. The play is real. Every new world adds one more thing that can tap me on the shoulder.
The empty queue
There are 4 cmux panels open on my screen.
Each one holds a different little world. I can define a piece of work, hand it over and watch the thing take shape while I move to another panel. If the task is clear enough, it can continue through my VPS after I close the laptop.
This still feels fkn magical.
The carpet got bigger. I can leave an idea running, go outside, drink a coffee and come back to something that didn’t exist when I left.
Each one holds a different little world. I can define a piece of work, hand it over and move to another panel. If the task is clear enough, it can continue through my VPS after I close the laptop.
Which means the game never technically has to stop.
The other day, I had to leave, but the queue was empty.
I had a few minutes. Enough to describe one small piece, press enter and close the laptop. The process continued while I put on my shoes and walked out the door.
There was a small pull to add one more thing before I left. I let it sit.
That felt deeply satisfying.
The good old German feeling of having used my time properly, now expanded to tokens. Every minute used. A small pile of bricks assembling itself while I was doing something else.
I could feel myself searching for one more thing to start. Something defined enough to run in the background. Something that would use the time while I was gone. I pushed leaving to the limit because an idle machine suddenly felt like a small wasted opportunity.
The good old German feeling of efficiency, now expanded to tokens.
Sometimes a small “I’m missing out” follows me toward the door.
Once I leave, I stop thinking about it.
I can shut it down relatively fast. I sit in a coffee shop, walk around or do something entirely different. I don’t have to be in the room for it to keep going. Later, I open the laptop and get the tiny jolt of seeing what happened while I was gone.
That’s what I used to think.
I got into a Grab and spent the ride somewhere else. I ordered Bún chả without noticing that I’d ordered it.
5 minutes later I was sitting across from Noela, still not there.
It’s not the first time she’s called me abwesend.
A game I love can begin asking the rest of my life to wait while I feed it one more brick.
The castle kept growing while I was outside.
Honestly, I love this.
I wonder how much of outside I’ll still notice.
Spiel and Ritus
In November 2024, I wrote 2 headings into a weekly note after watching Wim Wenders’ documentary about Anselm Kiefer.
Under Ritus, I wrote: fixed, serious, repeated, meaningful, attached to a larger context.
Under Spiel: free, experimental, spontaneous, open to variation and improvisation.
One Kiefer line stayed with me:
I only work so that I can be surprised.When play becomes fixed, it becomes ritual.
The first sentence is exactly what I’m feeling now.
I work because I want to see what happens. The next brick is visible while the castle stays hidden.
The second sentence feels different now.
A game can become fixed without anyone forcing it. It only has to repeat often enough that the repetition starts expecting something from me.
I used to build rituals that would force me into motion.
There was a period when my morning ran on command: make the bed, drink water, meditate for exactly 15 minutes, exercise for exactly 15 minutes.
Later, I split the working day into Toll and Play. The Toll came first. Hard things. Scary things. Play came after the serious work had been paid for.
That structure helped me. It carried me through obligations, fear and a life that still contained a lot of work I would never have chosen for its own sake.
Maybe those years built the floor.
Playing like this has a price, and I can pay it now. 10 years in, most of the bricks feel familiar even when the thing I’m building is new. AI makes an experiment cheap enough to throw away. And I can say no now. To the work I don’t want, and to the people I’d rather not spend time with.
Maybe I spent years buying the conditions that let me play again.
And now I’m on the floor.
I don’t know how long this lasts. Protecting it too hard is probably the fastest way to turn it back into something I have to do.
The old pressure was easy to see. It came with tasks, checkboxes and a clock.
Now the work has Pull. I want to do it.
German efficiency found a way to dress itself as play.
A rigid routine once told me every morning could be used. The new machine says every absence can be used too. Sleep. Coffee. A walk outside. All of it can carry a background process.
The possibility still feels small. I’m writing from the first slight tightening, before I know whether it becomes anything.
Something dull is easy to resent. Something I love can tighten almost invisibly because every extra minute still feels good.
I’m scared this game could consume me enough to become a shackle. That I lose some flexibility, then some freedom, then the ability to enjoy the other things I love because part of my mind is still standing over the Lego floor.
The strange thing is that I’m scared because I love it.
The bricks stay on the carpet overnight now. Nothing makes me pick them up in the morning. Nothing makes me stop, either.
I love this state.
I’m scared of it.