Ask HN: What Inspires Your Creativity?

A girl I was once crazy about in college... and we even dated for a time. Something about her still makes me ambitious. She's now working for the government and I work for the media, but unfortunately, it just didn't work out. She worked days, I worked nights... it just wasn't really going anywhere. So she was the spark that kept me going for a very long time. I'm sure it's still there, but time kind of forces you to move on a bit.

What keeps me going today, however, is the fact that I've just worked too many jobs of bosses trying to control me, not enough raises, empty promises of promotions, etc. At my latest dream job, they had me train a supervisor and when I got done and he thought he knew everything, he attempted to fire me.. and has tried at least every other month for the past 6 years. Fortunately for me, his boss hired me long before even knowing him, so he can threaten me all he wants. His boss has the final say and because I'm good at my job, I let him think he has that control -- even play the part and act like I'm scared, even though I couldn't care less if he somehow managed to pull it off. But I've been with the company for 8 years now... not sure how far he's going to get. A few months ago, I decided to call him on his bullshit, told him to write up the severance package and that I'd leave if he gave me a year salary including my 6 weeks PTO, or else he could fire me and I'd collect unemployment... surely collecting unemployment during COVID ain't too hard to do. Nothing happened. He hasn't threatened me since.

So... I'm always working on "fuck you money" (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck%20you%2...) and independent money which, for me, is to replace my entire salary so I can quit the job without ever worrying again. I've been working at it.. I've built up a business and all that, but I've not matched the salary quite yet, and working there for so long comes with its many benefits.

Anyways, if we're talking about what inspires my creativity for the web applications I build... I often see something that has an insane price, and I know I can make it better, so I do and sometimes undercut the competition. Other times I just want to take a single thing out of the product and I'll keep it simple and monetize that. I also love cdnjs.com and find a lot of new scripts there that inspire me to build something around those, particularly the CSS templates mixed in with the javascript files they offer. There are times where I will be working on one thing and I start to get bored, so I develop something else that actually helps me to understand a certain direction in the application I got bored with -- so that renews my interest in finishing it, during or after I finish the new application I started.

But mostly downtime and boredom.