No feedback, no one to bounce ideas off, no “nice job” at the end of the day.

The freedom is great, but it gets weirdly quiet.

Anyone else relate?

The main thing I'm missing at the moment is learning by osmosis from people with more experience. Learning stuff that I didn't know I didn't know. Mentorship.

Something I've been doing for general feedback is keeping my friends updated on what I'm up to and asking for their perspectives. There's a bit of a balance though cause you don't want them to associate you too strongly with your work and bring it up whenever you see them.

If you mean technical feedback then yeah not being surrounded by other engineers you can bounce ideas off kind of sucks...

Not sure how sporty you are but I have a pretty fixed weekly routine where I do sports with my friends some nights after "work" and I've found that great for forgetting about my project and pulling me away from the computer at a reasonable hour. For loneliness during the day I've found working somewhere busy helps, like a library. Maybe a nice way of framing it is that you can't get distracted by coworkers if you don't have any :)

I can relate, not sure what to do about it besides move to a hacker house in Thailand or such.

NPR's show 1A had a program on loneliness. There were a couple of interesting things: these days university cafeterias are quiet because everybody eats alone while looking at their phone. A Gen-Zer complained they 2 jobs and no time to socialize. On top of that, our third places are being ruined with hostile architecture (parks), or uncomfortable seating (Starbucks) because they want you to just do a mobile order and get out. Seems like the Internet should at least be a good third space, its called cyberspace after all, but at least idk how to get invited to the right discords or tiny social spaces where there's community.

In my friends group we regularly go coworking together. Sometimes we close our laptops and go get dinner or drinks after work. We are vaguely aware of what everyone is working on because we rant about it and ask each other for help. I use them for informal UX testing.

I also have a small audience on social media that lets me work in public. They are very supportive.

Yes, this road is very lonely. Always has been. Entrepreneurship is going against the grain, with no help or support. Until one day you make it and then everyone tells you how easy you have it. Is it no different than when European settlers came to America or all of the space program. Exploration is in our blood, few undertake such ventures, and it is always a lonely endeavour.

Not really. I have been writing my own software for personal use for several years. Yes, it’s quiet but it does everything I want as fast as I could want it to happen.

The worst thing about this is complete loss of compatibility to the world of corporate software employment. Other software developers do not think like this. In the land of employment you work on what you are told, no more and no less. If the stuff you work on is slow you just get to bitch about it. If there are frustrations or missing features then you simply wait for a patch that may never come.

I feel this. I think loneliness has been the principle feeling in my life forever, whether I'm with people very different to myself or like-minded. Lack of connection == lack of purpose, and that makes every action more difficult.

Piers Steel researches motivation and has a book called "The Procrastination Equation". In the book, motivation is modelled as Motivation = (Expectedness * Value) / (Impulse * Delay). In his academic papers, it's rendered as:

Utilityᵢ = (Eᵢ Vᵢ) / (Γᵢ D)

That is, the perceived utility of any action increases with the expectancy that one will be able to finish it, and the perceived value of the end result, and is reduced by a person's inclination to be impulsive or distracted and the end goal's distance from the present.

How can any action have utility if someone has no place in the world? As a social species, our purpose is largely defined socially. When you're going solo, it's hard to get a sense of value of a given action.

Hire an intern at minimum wage, theres a ton of ones from good schools that want to work at startups. hire two.

Curious why you are building?

nice job, man!