The Unbearable Lightness of Building

The mistaking of making for meaning

There's a particular high that comes at 2 AM when Claude Code and I birth another app into existence. No labor pains. No months of gestation. Just the wet, immediate miracle of something from nothing in a few hours flat.

I've built more in the last 365 days than in the previous decade. Each creation cheaper than the last energy drink sitting on my desk unfinished. Each easier than explaining to my mother what I actually do for a living.

Ben Horowitz says The Struggle is where greatness comes from. That every great entrepreneur struggled, so you are not alone. That the land of broken promises and crushed dreams is the only path to transcendence.

What Ben doesn’t explore: what happens when some part of The Struggle just... stops?

What happens when you can manifest faster than you can imagine?

What happens when the primary constraint becomes the poverty of your own dreams?

The Weight of Weightlessness

I decided to not reascend the corporate ladder not because it was too hard but because it had become too easy. The higher you go the more you realize how incorporeal it is. Each interaction choreographed, each decision pre-digested by layers of process. I didn’t go back to avoid drowning in the efficiency of my own forecasted irrelevance.

So I jumped.

Into what I thought (and maybe still think?) would be The Struggle.

As months pass I’m reckoning with something more alarming: frictionless creation.

Watch: I'll build the beginnings of a Micro-SaaS product while you read this essay. Not metaphorically. Literally. I've got Cursor open behind this tab. Five Claude Code terminals invoked, named and eager, attentive, already anticipating my prompts. Primed with my specs and accumulated context. By the time you finish this paragraph, we'll have scaffolded the billing logic.

This is the opposite of struggle. More like assisted living for the imagination.

The old paradox was this: You needed to suffer to create anything meaningful. The new paradox seems crueler: You can create without suffering. Which makes you wonder if meaning itself was just a cope for friction.

My GitHub contribution graph looks like a heat map of mania. Green squares everywhere. A visual representation of my “newfound productive output”. But also—if I'm honest—a seismograph of existential panic.

What’s weird about instant gratification at the speed of thought: It's fucking terrifying.

When you can build nearly anything, what you choose to build becomes the only measure of who you are. No more hiding behind "if only I could code" or "if only I had time" or "if only I had resources."

The mirror Claude Code holds up shows exactly what your imagination is worth at market rates. Mine? Not quite much yet, honestly.

The Economics of Dreams

Let's talk about money, since I’m being achingly honest here.

I could afford to leave my executive role and not go back. I can afford to build disposable software because my disposable income is larger than many in the world’s primary income. I could afford to spend a few months in a creative fugue because my wife's health insurance covered us both.

The "gentle violence" of my transformation was cushioned by years of careful financial plotting, many lucky outcomes and being dual-income no kids.

So when I write about the democracy of creation, about eight-year-old Fay building Harry Potter apps, I'm performing another kind of violence myself.

The violence of false universality. The violence of pretending that everyone can simply choose to stop struggling and “start”.

I know this.

The means to dream is a luxury good.

Building as Advanced Procrastination

Here's something I've built: A Reddit sentiment analyzer that runs in production. An advent of code solver. A URL shortener that nobody really absolutely needed (but I quite like and some do use). A handful of other products that solve problems I'm not sure quite exist.

Here's a couple things I haven't built: Relationships that I’m proud of with certain people who I would prefer to be closer with. The courage to sit still for thirty minutes without reaching for the next dopamine hit of instantiation.

I build certain things because building them is easier than being.

I build because every new project is a fresh opportunity to avoid the projects I cannot compile: Who am I when I'm not producing? What value do I have independent of my output? Why does the ease of creation feel like drowning in possibility?

Marcus Aurelius. Ah my constant companion in these meditations. He’d recognize this immediately. The flight from self through endless action. The confusion of motion with progress. The mistaking of making for meaning.

The Lightness That Crushes

Milan Kundera wrote that the heaviest of burdens crushes us, but simultaneously "the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become."

The opposite of burden is not freedom. It's weightlessness. And weightlessness, Kundera warns, causes man to "become lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant."

This is where I live now. In the half-real space between imagination and instantiation. Where every idea can become code in minutes. Where every whim can wear the costume of productivity.

I am more creative than I've ever been and often feel less grounded than I've ever felt.

We can build anything, so we build everything. The risk: we build nothing that matters.

Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer. Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim that it can’t hold out against that…well, then, heap shame upon it. — VIII. 36

The Horror of Getting Exactly What You Want

I wanted to be free from meetings. Now I code alone at 2 AM.

I wanted to build without barriers. Now I must resist the drift to build without purpose.

I wanted to escape the struggle. Now I'm re-discovering that The Struggle is of course what gives weight to work.

You see, The Struggle that Horowitz describes—where your guts boil and you feel like you're going to spit blood—at least that's real. It's embodied. It's human. It connects you to every creator who came before, who also bled for their work.

But this? This weightless creation? This is something new. Something post-human. Something that makes you wonder if you're still the author of your own life or just a particularly sophisticated prompt engineer for your own existence.

And yet.

And yet.

Despite everything I've written above (or perhaps because of it) the strength to Dream IS everything. To manifest your imagination into reality IS the most profound personal reward.

Not because it's easy now. But because in its very easiness, it reveals the hardest truth: We are running out of excuses for not becoming who we really are.

When the barriers fall, when the tools disappear into pure intention, when thought becomes a thing at the speed of your typing… well we're left to confront the most difficult creative constraint of all: ourselves.

The lightness isn't in the building. The lightness is in discovering that you can build anything and still feel emptiness. That you can create at the speed of thought and still not think of anything worth creating. That you can have all the tools and none of the vision.

This is the unbearable lightness of building: Not that it's too easy, but that its easiness reveals how little we know about why we wanted to build in the first place.

So here I sit, 9:27 PM on August 14th. The cursor blinks. Claude waits. The infinite possible sprawls before me like a drunken god.

I realize: The Struggle now is not about the difficulty of building a thing—company, product, whatever.

The Struggle really is about becoming someone worth building for.

The tools we have aren’t solving the right problem. They've removed the barriers to expression when we hadn't yet figured out what we need to express.

This is the unbearable lightness of building: infinite power, infinite possibility, impoverished imagination.

The luxury to dream is everything.

But first you must summon the strength to dream something meaningful.