The second sock syndrome is perhaps never an issue if you have a real environment of collaboration, comadrerie or even apprenticeship. Just more yarn and code by yourself is not going to cut it for long unless you have an external motivator.

The chemicals which activate our sense of happiness more than anything is the feeling when we see our friends and family have breakthroughs and achieving a goal. It’s probably a bigger factor for the one that is trying to reach that goal.

This is perhaps why twitch is so popular, even in an activity such as gaming which has been made to be fun by itself alone, socialization is a force multiplier.

I can have a sense of this at different work places, people are so focused on result and not on the process that people stop caring of craftmanship and disciplin. In the long term it makes the company rot from the inside with high turn over and lost knowledge and increase of technical debt and finally a losing business.