Giving Up The Dream

I spent most of the last 15 years trying and failing to be an independent mobile application developer.

I should note that, professionally, I’m still a mobile application developer. But coming out of college with my computer science degree, all I wanted was to be an independent developer. Emphasis on independent. I wanted to be my own boss and work on my own products. That was The Dream.

I released three different applications independently. One each year from 2010 to 2012. But none of those applications are available to download today. And of the dozen or so other applications I started since, not one of them has ever made it into any app store.

There are a lot of reasons why my production fell off in 2012. Unfocused development, for one. Two of my apps were for Android, and one was for Windows 8 (?!). I was even working on a hybrid mobile-web application at one point.

There was some procrastination too. And there was the kind of procrastination where I felt like I was doing something important because it was vaguely related to my goal. Prime examples were consuming tech news and fiddling with my computer/smartphone/tablet setup. The seasoned procrastinator knows this as yak shaving.

I still had to make money while doing all of that. I actively avoided commitment because I didn’t want other priorities to get in the way when I would leave in pursuit of The Dream. That motivation was short-sighted and lead me to make a lot of bad business decisions.

Contracting helped me avoid the commitment of salaried employment, or so I thought. I took the first clients that came along and they were pretty bad. Out of inexperience and hubris, I negotiated fixed-price contracts that looked good for me in the short-term, but they assumed the project scope was bounded and straight-forward. Invariably my clients demanded more features and changes and the project scope ballooned. The fixed-price of the contract meant that as the project dragged on, the amount I earned for the hours I worked fell below minimum wage. I worked myself into literal poverty.

The Dream was still alive, but being truly broke changed me. If I had made good money from one of my independent apps, or if a client that paid me fairly – rather than exploited my lack of business experience – I would be a very different person today.

Instead I spent several years living in a world where nothing was free and everything was a struggle. I scrambled to make some piece of software that would somehow catapult me out of my situation.

In that moment, my software ideas completely curdled. The purpose of my first few apps had been easy to explain to normal people. I made a music player, a LinkedIn app, and a text editor.

But after a few years of not releasing anything, and facing a harsh economic reality, my ideas turned into I need to release something that will make money, which is not the basis for a strong product vision. My ideas became technically convoluted, difficult to explain, and had questionable value.

For example, I spent a couple of years building a content management system for mobile apps. It was along the lines of the crappy cookie-cutter websites that a lot of restaurants have today, but in mobile app form. Sound good? Didn’t think so. It’s okay because it never saw the light of day anyway.

I felt like a failure all the time. I frequently ran into one of the unwritten rules of our society. If you don’t have any money, you need to have a story that you can tell middle class people about how you’re working to solve your lack-of-money problem. At least that’s the rule if you want to avoid strangers giving you advice on how to run your life.

In the early days, I could say I was an independent mobile application developer because I had a couple apps. No matter that I wasn’t making any money from them. I could spin it in the language of upward mobility, like saying I was getting experience or learning about the app market. But after several years without releasing anything, my story lost credibility. And I felt the discrepancy between my story and what I actually accomplished. How could I be an independent developer if nothing I made was available to the public?

I was reminded of this difficult time when a couple months ago I saw a video on YouTube called The Art of a Flop Era (a desktop documentary) by Elanor Nadorff. Elanor had a childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker and her college experience was cut-off by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now several years later, she hasn’t achieved anything that she hoped she would by 24 and feels ashamed and disappointed in herself all the time. At times she was driven by a fantasy that the excitement of her ideas would drive her. Instead her reality – which is the part I relate to the most – is that she’s overwhelmed by the weight of what she failed to accomplish and wonders if she will ever break out of the cycle. She is chasing a fixed point of success which seems to be getting farther away the more time passes.

For me a lot of the cycle of depression was a product of the perspective of youth. My mid-20’s was an imaginative boundary where I couldn’t envision much of anything beyond it. This is sometimes called a “quarter -life crisis”.

The Dream’s timeline carried me through college, with another four or five years to get my life together – putting me around 24 or 25. Reaching the end felt like approaching a kind of death, as if my life story was concluding. There would be no sequel because I hadn’t become interesting or successful enough to justify one.

I experienced – much like in Elanor’s video – that life goes on with or without a plan. I met someone that I was crazy about. I made efforts to show up for her in a way that I didn’t in previous relationships. We moved in together and merged lives, more than being roommates that are romantically involved. Her concerns and responsibilities were added to mine. Her dog became my dog. Her family became my family. And not long after, we got married. And I got a full-time salaried job so she could quit hers to find another.

I found more purpose and meaning in a few shared experiences with my spouse than in all my pursuit of The Dream. I still clung to the idea of returning to it and wasted plenty more time, but The Dream’s days were numbered, whether I accepted it or not.

It’s been about three years since I officially quit being – or more realistically aspiring to be – an independent software developer.

Around the time I officially gave up the dream, I read this article in The Atlantic about “quiet quitting” where Amelia Nagoski said (emphasis mine):

Once you see evidence that quiet quitting would be better for you, the real challenge is grieving the loss of something you thought was valuable, mourning the time and energy you invested into a relationship where you were not valued the way you deserved to be, and finding something new in your life that does give you what you thought (and were told) you would get from your work.

Giving up The Dream was my own quiet quitting. It was painful to give up being an independent mobile app developer, regardless of my lack of output and success. Even if my time as an independent developer was largely delusions of grandeur, they were my delusions of grandeur. They were my aspirations, my self-image. It was an important part of my life. And it was over.

I let The Dream drag on for so long because I love computers. I’ve been using them since I was four and can’t imagine life without them. But aligning my hobby with my career was a mistake—it turned everything I did into a pursuit of profit, even indirectly. I couldn’t just make a mobile app for myself like I had done when I made my first app. Instead I had to make an app business. And things that should have been fun and whimsical turned into thankless work.

That’s why it’s so satisfying to do things like make a retro video game system, try out using dumbphones, and writing for this website. These are things I never would have done a few years ago. I would have found them in conflict with The Dream. Better to be yak shaving.

Now, I look back on letting go of The Dream with relief. For years, I was haunted by imaginary obligations and the guilt that came with them. Cutting that madness out of my life freed me to focus on what truly matters—things unrelated to profit or success.

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