People always talk about pursuing coding projects just for the fun of it outside of work, but that's a pretty unusual trait for other forms of engineering.
My father has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and has been doing crude assay work for the last twenty years. He obviously enjoys and gets fulfillment out of his job. But if you asked him to analyze crude oil samples on his free time? He'd say you're crazy.
I dunno, I've been in this field for five or so years coming out of other engineering disciplines, and it always surprises me how programmers view their trade as fundamentally different from other forms of engineering.
Read any interview with a novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, etc and most will say it's something they hated doing but were glad to get done.
Pushed further though, I've seen good advice in some of those interviews which is to try to learn to enjoy the process, as what happens with the finish product is usually out of their hands. I think that's pretty applicable to a lot of other fields as well.
Did you ever dream of debugging your children? That if you could only find the right breakpoint to set, you could adjust them and fix something? Then you are truly a programmer.
Or maybe it's a sign that you should take some time off coding and not take your work home and give the other half of your brain some room to wander and explore space and time.
Furthermore, being able to transfer concepts from one activity to another is a clear sign of intelligence: applying an idea to 1-dimensional text and then applying it to social relations isn't a passive activity either, it shows deep understanding of the idea.