I get paid by the hour during business hours to code. Why is there such a pull to code out of hours and how do others manage this?
“1. The sheer joy of making things.
2. The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people.
3. The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts, and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning.
4. The joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task.
5. The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination.”
There’s real pleasure to building software, as long as you stay above drudgery, churn, and/or repetition
It sounds like you're headed for burnout --- just about the time you discover that no one wants to hire you any more due to your age.