"The joy is in the playing."

This is beautiful and certainly applicable beyond this thread. I would imagine that the sizeable majority of programmers that find themselves wrapped up in the monestary have a genuine love of programming. A week doesn't pass during which the dreary routine of my job is brightened by the opportunity to apply my programming skills to help a co-worker with a manual task that would be incredibly tedious if left unautomated.
Ask yourself why you're spending time writing code that wasn't required of you... is it to really help some clueless benefactor or is it simply for the joy of coding in and of itself. I love the book "The Fountainhead":
"My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am...Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity."
Learning to program for it's intrinsic rewards will obliterate any dependence and misgiving inherent in worrying what others will make of it.
-Jason