Hey Zach, I'm in a similar boat to you, although less prolific. I read your post as saying "I'm trying to figure out what to do next", and this is some food for thought in that regard. Personally, moving forward I intend to do what you call a "project deep dive", but from a slightly different angle.

There was another highly upvoted post on HN last week titled "Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers" [0]. The article itself had a lot of interesting advice, distilled from interviews with people who had taken side projects and turned them into profitable businesses.

In the comments, soneca had some insightful additions [1]. And we are increasingly in an attention-driven economy [2]. But while attention is being widely harvested through exploiting addictive tendencies [3], that does not motivate me. Reading Hooked [4] was interesting, but also terrifying.

For me, bringing this together means my course of action is as follows: Build an audience around content which enriches the lives of people. Way easier said than done. And some may write it off as hopelessly naive.

But while Facebook and friends scour the dopamine landscape for user attention, building an audience around long-term content that challenges and enriches the lives of people seems wonderfully contrarian to me. And it's in that contrarian tenet that I find solace. Take the slow and the long road, and you can build a sustainable source of value.

In the grand scheme of things, spending a few years of my life creating short interactive games which explore philosophy and society is the path that makes the most sense to me. Like I said, food for thought in your journey forward.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803468

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803468#unv_14804395

[2]: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...

[3]: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

[4]: https://www.amazon.ca/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Product...