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Musings

Zach Saucier's thoughts

Create useful things

There are a whole lot of people in the world. Everyone creates something, a lot people create stuff every day. Thus there is way more stuff in the world than people!

Now, our time in this world is limited. That means that we should make use of the time that we do have. Which means that we all have some important questions to answer while we can, like “What is the purpose of life?”, “What happens after I die?”, “What is God like?”, and many others. If you want to discuss what I think about these feel free to message me.

But our limited time also means that we should spend our time creating and doing things that are valuable. Now, there are a lot of things that fit in this tag and it depends on the individual and the situation. This is a good thing that makes us unique and diverse. What we need to have is good judgement as to what is important and what is not.

The most important questions are the ones like those I posed above. Belief about spiritual, family, and life matters should always come first. In addition to this, we all work at one point or another and we should attempt to make our work meaningful. But sometimes we just need to work to get money to provide for what is most important so that doesn’t always happen.

However something that we do have control over is what we do with our free time. The time we spend doing side projects and learning different things. This is what I want to focus in on today.


When I started getting into web programming, I created a lot of small projects to learn different programming techniques and skills largely based on StackOverflow questions and recreating things I saw. These were invaluable and taught me the majority of the things that I know now about web programming.

I continued to create these projects for some time. However at some point, I stopped learning something from creating them but continued to make them because they became easy. I was recreating gifs using CSS, but to what end?

I regret this period of time where I spent my free time building projects that didn’t teach me anything nor were helpful to very many people. My time, like all of ours, is more valuable than that.

Once I realized this was happening I decided to change. Now whenever I am working on a project in my free time, I make sure that it will either teach me something worth learning or is helpful for other people to a significant capacity. Optimally it does both!

I suggest that you do the same, whatever your field is, because I don’t want your or my time to be wasted.