I like this post. I've been developing proprietary software pretty much my whole life and I learned a long time ago to take things at a relaxed pace. I'll work to burnout and crush the tasks of entire teams, solo. The worst part about all of that, though is:

1.) Some management or clients will then come to expect the same performance 24/7/365

2.) Most projects never actually "end". You just unlock more work, known as scope creep :/.

If the task was: "Hey, move these bricks to the other side of that patio", you could look at the pile of bricks and know how close you were to getting finished.

Software development and a lot of other IT jobs are more akin to somebody saying "Hey, move every third brick to the other side of that patio and stack them in the shape of a tesseract", and you look over to the pile of bricks, which happens to just be an endless interdimensional vortex vomiting "brick-like" shapes that make it hard to tell when you've actually encountered the third "brick"... you begin doing all this, knowing full well that there is no way to eventually stack them into the shape of a tesseract.