Why Every Engineer Needs a Creative Outlet
There’s a strange kind of burnout no one talks about
not the physical one where you’re tired,
but the creative one where you forget what joy feels like.
It happens quietly.
You wake up one day and realise your whole life revolves around fixing things: bugs, systems, deployments, people.
Everything you do has a purpose, a ticket, a deadline.
And then you blink, and you can’t remember the last time you did something for no reason.
That’s why every engineer needs a creative outlet
something useless, irrational, and deeply yours.
Because structure will eat you alive
Tech trains you to think in systems
clean, modular, testable.
But life doesn’t always have an API.
You can’t debug sadness or containerize peace.
Sometimes you need to build something that doesn’t scale.
A poem that no one reads.
A playlist that makes no sense.
A doodle on the back of your to-do list.
Because not everything worth building needs uptime.
The art of being unproductive
The first time I picked up a guitar again after months of deployments,
my brain resisted.
“What’s the ROI?” it whispered.
“What are we optimizing?”
But five minutes in, I wasn’t optimizing anything
I was just existing.
And that’s rare in a world that measures everything.
Creating something for no reason is a rebellion.
It reminds you that you’re not a pipeline.
You’re a person who builds things because it feels good.
Your creativity isn’t a side project
We treat creativity like a hobby,
but maybe it’s maintenance for the soul.
The same way we monitor servers to keep them alive,
we should monitor ourselves for signs of disconnection.
When your curiosity starts feeling mechanical,
when your joy has logs but no output
that’s your system alert.
Go draw. Sing. Write nonsense. Dance terribly.
Anything that reminds you you’re not just a brain in a hoodie.
Building for yourself again
The best builders aren’t just smart they’re alive.
They know how to feel, how to fail, how to play.
They understand that creativity is just engineering without rules.
So yeah, deploy your app.
Ship your infra.
But also make a mess.
Write something pointless.
Take a walk without a podcast.
You’re allowed to create just because it makes you smile.