I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
I do that too! Sometimes it feels silly and a bit depressing to spend my days turning colored lights on and off, but at other times I think of it differently:
I'm writing in a number of languages that (apparently) many people cannot understand, let alone be fluent in. This language allows me to write things into existence, entire complex structures. In fact, within the bounds of the virtual (mostly), I can create pretty much anything I want!
As a child I created a game that my father actually got addicted to. I didn't need paper, pencils, scissors, or any other things that I'm not too good with. Just a computer and a knowledge of it's language (Object Pascal).
As a teenager, I created realistic environments that many people spent hours immersed in, sneaking, attacking, finding secrets, and whatnot. And while I did need a mouse and some special visual tools for that (UnrealEd and JkEdit), it also involved 'writing'.
And now, as an adult, I created my own tools for journalling and time tracking, etc., a number of 'online publication platforms', and even a few minor things that escape the bounds of the virtual. And all by writing in these special languages! It still feels like magic after all these years.
While sometimes I wish my work felt more 'real', like the tables a friend of mine 'hand-crafts', I still sometimes stop and marvel at what I can do with just a text editor and a laptop. And now more than ever before it's possible to create things that actually do stuff in the 'real' world. That might be my next big focus.
And I didn't even mention how all this makes me enough money to not worry about making money, or the fact that I have an amount of control over the results that I suspect many other people would envy.
I try to remind myself of that when I'm faced with some ridiculous CSS hack, a silly request from a client, or a weird bug hidden in the ridiculous amount of layers of abstraction at the basis of my day to day work.
I forgot that I also push around a little puck on the table that also changes the pattern of the lights depending on its position, and I have to push it to a different specific place and press a button. I repeat that many thousand times per day.
I actually did used to work on the USS Enterprise, the one that floats in the water on Earth. I was a sailor, it was in the shipyards for overhaul, and there weren't a lot of operational blinking lights at the time. But there was a hell of a lot of grinding away old paint and putting on new paint.
