I totally agree. I personally will never work on any of these things unless the end result is being used, either by myself or someone else. Or I'm getting paid for it. Spending all that time working on something that ultimately reinvents the wheel and just ends up gathering dust in a github repo just feels so pointless to me.

No offence if you enjoy this sort of thing though, of course. Just not my bag.

It differs from person to person I guess. For me it is more about learning and understanding stuff. It motivates me more than doing my day to day job, because I encounter completely different domains and problems :)

1000% the same. I often get motivated to mess around with or learn something for the sake of it, but have a very hard time choosing something to get motivated to mess around with or learn about.

Give me someone who needs me to build something I don't already know how to build, though, and I will figure that shit out.

I've been lucky that this has worked out well for me so far, but it means I need to always try to get on projects with unfamiliar things or take new jobs involving unfamiliar things, or I'll have a really hard time expanding my skillset.

Oh, and school sucked.

:( These are the projects that I look forward to though. Not having anyone to please is a very nice break. I find that to be the opposite of useless.

Then make something useful, at least for yourself. A tool that helps your productivity. An emulator that you will actually play games on.