I ran into the same thing and started missing coding so I started doing projects here and there for fun. I’d agree, don’t take on any large projects or it starts to get stressful. At least at first. This was a pretty fun one for me: try to recreate the Game of Life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

That was a really great short story, thanks for recommending! So cool.

I’ll have to check out the book too!

This theory I have to prove that our universe needs life to exist.

Currently, every galaxy is accelerating away from one another, which will eventually reach speeds at or faster than the speed of light, so humans in the future would not even be able to see other galaxies. We might even forget that there were galaxies out there in the first place and think that our galaxy is the complete universe. Physics would pretty much evolve backwards. After that, maybe the expansion of space will be so large that matter won’t be able to exist.

On the other hand, life organizes matter. At its most basic definition, life takes energy and reverses entropy. I’m thinking that maybe life needs to colonize our galaxy and other galaxies, creating order in the universe and that would be the only chance of it surviving. Since we multiply at an exponential rate, we could calculate how long it will take us to colonize Mars, and then another planet, another solar system, and so on. As long as that rate becomes faster (with limitation to the speed of light for travelling) than the expansion of the universe, maybe future civilizations will have figured out how to keep matter from falling apart.

So maybe our universe only exists because it was the one that would allow life to exist, which in turn would allow it to exist. If you only consider time as a 4th dimension, then all of this would need to be true at once to occur.