I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work.
This is the difference between people who are creative for a living and people who merely wish to be creative while earning a living. For 95% of programming work, if you're reasonably bright and experienced, getting it done boils down to the very difficult and subtle art of not being bored to the point of depression. Creativity requires the opposite art: being easily bored, tormented by the familiar. That would make any programmer miserable and unproductive.
I disagree. I see part of my job (software developer) as creative writing because I get to manipulate abstractions and generate something tangible. I feel the iterative process of making something from a blank editor screen is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job. Yes, there is frustration and sometimes I lose myself in focus and become irritable (to interrupting coworkers) but when it flows, it flows like running the rack in pool.
I wonder if you consider yourself “creative for a living” because I am, and your generalization does not ring any bells for me.
Creative people are often motivated by a task, filling in holes in the patterns they see (and finding these patterns), not by boredom.
I don’t smoke or gamble and have no interest in picking it up. Drinking is limited to “on special occasions” (and that is how I like it). I do however like to travel, and that is my guilty pleasure.
I can feel guilty about this (hence guilty pleasure), so I travel less than what I want to, exactly because it affects “work”, like the grand parent talks about. But that feeling helps me be creative for a living, because I finish the things I start rather than go awol, smoking, drinking, or traveling the world.
Agree with you. But, I believe creative people get bored easily except when they are not creating something and so they would get bored of too much gambling, drinking, dressing up, spending money, finding/buying sex. All these vices are mostly ways of removing brain clog (engaging the brain in trivial activities so that the creative part can sleep and start afresh). But there are better ways of doing this.
I also disagree. Creativity requires that someone see rules as suggestions, and then go beyond them to ultimately accomplish what the rules were trying to take you to in the first place. In my experience, programming takes a lot of creativity to make a more efficient process... creativity is like seeing the world as a puzzle when everyone else is spacing out.
This is the difference between people who are creative for a living and people who merely wish to be creative while earning a living. For 95% of programming work, if you're reasonably bright and experienced, getting it done boils down to the very difficult and subtle art of not being bored to the point of depression. Creativity requires the opposite art: being easily bored, tormented by the familiar. That would make any programmer miserable and unproductive.