GoKawiilFor thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
Someone on the Phish Facebook group reposted a TikTok overdub. Vanessa Bayer and Paul Rudd at a lunch table, losing their minds to a song while their coworkers stare. The original was Fleetwood Mac. Whoever made it swapped in “Down With Disease.”
That move is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared enough about the song and the bit that they rebuilt a piece of pop culture around the band. That’s how the scene works. People spend their time doing things like this for free, because the music asks for it.
For thirty years, that was me at my desk.
I used to make a joke that if I ever had to interview for a new job, I’d need to ask the interviewer to put Phish on so I could actually program for them. I’d say it as a joke, because saying it straight would have made it sound deranged. But it wasn’t a joke. After three decades, the cue and the state had fused. I could not, with any reliability, get into the zone without the music. The conditioning was complete and I knew it.
I would make the joke and people would laugh, and I would laugh too, and underneath that we both knew I was telling the truth.
I got into Phish in 1995. By then I had already been programming for years, self-taught. In 1998 I got my first professional job in tech. I was 15.
Around that time I also tried to get a normal teenage job. There was a grocery store near my house and I went in to apply, figuring I could bag groceries on weekends like everybody else. They turned me down. Not because I was too young or too inexperienced. They told me I was overqualified. A 15 year old kid with programming on his application was, somehow, too much for the grocery store.
So I kept programming. There was never any other plan.
All I ever wanted to do was listen to Phish and program. That was the whole list. It didn’t have qualifiers. It didn’t have a third thing I sometimes wanted instead. There was no balance I was striving for. There was the music and the code, and there wasn’t anything else competing for the space.
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