No one around me understands what I'm doing on the internet or what all these keystrokes mean. When they see a chicken coop I built, my beautiful tomatoes or home that looks 100x better than before I started on it, I get to see a look of appreciation for that work on their face.
Programming is abstract and the appreciation of it is only a surface level appreciation because they only see what's on the web page, not all the nuts, bolts, and pipes that make it work.
It sounds vain to want that appreciation, but I do. I spend thousands and thousands of hours building an elaborate web system, lots of them actually, and I barely get a smile. People don't even know what it is. How can they appreciate it?
When I work with my hands, I spend a couple hours painting a room and people are like, "Wow! That looks SOOOO much better!" Or "Did you build those chicken pens yourself? You should do that for a living, people will pay good money for pens like that!"