Sometimes we do things with computers because we're paid for them, and that's fine. Sometimes we do them because they solve a problem we think should be solved, or to learn something we think we could use later, or just to show others what we can do. Those are all valid reasons!
But sometimes we use deeply uncool programming tools in indefensible ways to do something of no conceivable social, technical, or artistic merit, and this gives us a joy so deep and pure we are glad we don't have to explain, because we couldn't. The Ancient Greeks called it enthusiasm, which doesn't mean "I'm giving my 110% to this work project" but rather "a god has possessed me with an idea for a program, so here we go."
I was lucky enough to learn programming in a personal and social context where it was of no foreseeable professional or reputational value. Like chocolate, like a cartoon, like a cool book, a BASIC prompt was not a tool for something, it was a joy by itself, a compulsion for something beautiful and interesting that needed no justification. Today I code sometimes professionally — including the programming aspects of Data Science and AI design — sometimes to help something I think should be helped, sometimes as a tool for something else, but sometimes simply because I've been possessed by a pointless idea for a useless program that something tells me — and that something is never wrong— I'll have enormous fun with.
Here's a dangerous secret: many of our professional leaps come from those indefensible fascinations. Everybody has a reason to study the tools and technologies in current demand, and if you have an idea of what might be in demand in the future, and seek to learn it, chances are others are doing it too. But the big leaps, the things that redefine your activity, are as often as not the result of the market doing one of its unpredictable twists and finding you already there playing by yourself for no reason at all.
It's a dangerous secret, of course, not to tell but to know, because if you remember it then you'll try to second-guess your play, either by choosing what to play with or by approaching it in some deliberate way. As pretty much every Ancient Greek story will tell you, you can neither fake nor control inspiration. Just pay attention to the quiet whispers of pure, irrational technical desire, and give yourself time and space to indulge in them. Not because of what they might lead to, but because of what they are.
They are joyful, and the joy is the point.
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