I've seen a lot of Animal Crossing screenshots recently; people will spend an incredible amount of time working on something to make it look nice. They can spend hours to make simulation-life more productive in a way that gets such a marginal return, they won't make the hours back.
Meanwhile, I've recently spent an equally unreasonable amount of time unifying my bash environment across all machines so that I get a different color for each host name. So now my bash prompt is color coded by machine. I was lying to myself about it being more productive or whatever. I did it because I thought it would be neat, and it looks cool, and I felt pretty clever implementing it. One of my customers is a lawncare website and I get some satisfaction seeing the @host turn from blue to green when I ssh into their server. I think this is the same human satisfaction of organizing your toolshed, or customizing your town in Animal Crossing.
I genuinely get so much enjoyment over tinkering around with my tools, apps, shell, you name it. When everything is tweaked to look nice to me, work nicely, scripts automating things and when everything just clicks.. it's amazing.
I used to re-arrange my bedroom every few months when I was a kid, I feel like I do the equivalent with my dev machine. Look at tweaking themes, switching out plugins/tools, updating things, change things around a little bit and I always love it afterwards.
I also play Animal Crossing and I find it an interesting comparison. I'm playing with my GF and we made a plan of how we want the island to look and the timeline is 3-4 weeks with everything (because of how artificially they slow down a lot of things). Each individual thing sounds tedious and boring (dig up that whole hill, place all the paths, etc. etc.) but it feels good in the end for some reason. It turns into what we imagined, what we wanted it to look like and work, the same way I guess my dev setup right now.
I've spent so much time just tinkering and it gives me great joy!
Meanwhile, I've recently spent an equally unreasonable amount of time unifying my bash environment across all machines so that I get a different color for each host name. So now my bash prompt is color coded by machine. I was lying to myself about it being more productive or whatever. I did it because I thought it would be neat, and it looks cool, and I felt pretty clever implementing it. One of my customers is a lawncare website and I get some satisfaction seeing the @host turn from blue to green when I ssh into their server. I think this is the same human satisfaction of organizing your toolshed, or customizing your town in Animal Crossing.