There's a lot of comments here about focusing on yourself with meditation or hobbies or whatever. But that's just ways to survive a job you don't care about. It's a workaround.

If you spend all day training your brain to hate programming your brain will learn to hate programming. You need to change jobs. And then you will have to spend at least a year to slowly restore your brain to a working state.

It took me ~two years.

Now I'm excited about programming and has been for 8 years solid. Changed jobs again recently to keep that fire burning. There is no substitute for your job being meaningful.

And what to do when you couldn’t possibly care about any job that would hire you?

meditation, hobbies and whatever

The only time I am able to regain that "in the zone" feeling from 15 years ago is when I try some completely new stack/framework/language on a fresh project. The problem is I can't do that all the time because I've started dozens of projects and wasted years without finishing anything.

I will be monitoring this thread for any help. This is a serious problem for me.

If you have ADHD there is a rich set of literature on managing it, supplements to investigate (lots of discussions in the nootropic community) and the meds can be a life changing tool when used responsibly.

Our brains need rewards to to be able to motivate us to do hard things.

When you only do the things you feel you should with nothing fun. You effectively are doing the same as punishing yourself every-time you are doing the thing you want to be motivated about.

Eventually your brain will start to fight to not do it.

The trick to get it back is apparently to start finding small things that are fun and easy and to do some unrelated external things to also just give your brain some time off.

Basically you want to follow similar patterns as if you are training an animal

By doing the small things that give you a treat. You are training your brain to want to do more of it.

You also need to spend some time on external things to work. That way the times when you have to work on things that are not rewarding you have something else to counter balance this.

This should not be something computer related if possible.

Also if it can be something where you get more human contact it’s recommended.

I’m talking as someone who is slowly recovering from this as well.

Still lots of work to go

But it definitely does improve. Just takes time.

I think i have developed a set of actions, unconsciously, to balance work/fun and rewarding my self.

Whenever i start a new project my gym/workout routine also grows otherwise i feel unmotivated.

Competitive gaming is another reward. It's something i can do every day for 30-40 minutes, feels rewarding, and stabilises my mood.

You are trying to force yourself to enjoy a single thing that happens to be something you've been doing since youth, and now do as a career, and are now telling yourself it must remain fun!

Do you see how this might cause you suffering when your beliefs are not met?

I also have been working with computadors since my youth, and also don't find it as fun anymore. Sometimes I get into a flow and find myself enjoying it, but I really can't sustain that for more than 2-3 hours straight.

I recently was able to leverage my very consistent and hard work at a new company and convince them to keep me on as a contractor (I stopped working full time). I have saved enough to give me enough runway (~1 year) to heal myself (literally, repetitive stress injury in right wrist that I forced myself to ignore for many years).

In the last note of my random internet post to a stranger: this is my fourth year gardening. I have found that plants, nature, the insane level of complexity that exists in 1 cm^3 of soil blows my fascination of computers out of the water. Computing really isn't the most interesting thing in the world. Find something that puts computers to shame.

Beyond that, I’ll offer as a 40 year old who’s been there...find people to help. Finding people who need help is always the way to working on things that feel interesting.

I've changed companies, and now I don't have any of that. I don't even remember how my bosses voice sounds: it's a remote position where we communicate in text, mostly asynchronously. There's no task tracking, just company chat. I almost never get asked when will I complete something; we just discuss what needs to be done, and then I do it. If I don't feel like working, I don't. Nobody's tracking my time. And later, when I get internal motivation, I put in 20 hours of uninterrupted, productive work.

I don't think that I've ever been that happy coding in my entire life.

If you're able to and not already exercising regularly and getting enough sleep, I find both these things put my work in a totally different perspective. I was chronically sleep deprived and not exercising enough in my 20s and I was often in a bad mood and rarely felt much awe about anything.

That is a quite insightful way of looking at this kind of problem, thanks! Quite a few disturbances to inner peace can probably be summed about with that, from what I understand panic attacks can for example be exasperated through 'fear of experiencing fear'...

There's probably a lesson about mindfulness in there, in the sense of: focus on first order sensations, the higher orders are just muddying the mental waters.

I'd recommend starting up a low pressure project on the side. Figure out what made coding fun for you and focus on that in your project. It can be hard to get started, so you want to make sure it's fun and not full of too much boring stuff. What I mean by the latter is that there are certain aspects of coding that you do for work that are necessarily boring, at least for me. For instance, writing unit tests, or making clean commits, etc. I used to find those elements fun in my side projects but over time I realized that I "learned" them enough and that doing them made the side projects less fun. Instead, I now throw caution to the wind when doing stuff on the side. If something isn't interesting, I don't do it, or I try to limit the amount of boring stuff.

It helps to have low expectations and just engage in things for fun. Over time, you can really build up something nice if you work on it consistently. Just don't focus on the end goal too much or how much you're progressing because that's when it starts feeling like "work".

Then i switched to something radically different from my daily job. Looked deep into my early hacking days and i remembered how i enjoyed writing games (at that time a bit with directx and dark basic - heck i was loving it).

Recently, I started diving into 3d game dev, 3D modelling and texturing. If you enjoy hacking things then i think this is it, at least for me. I find that everything around game dev is a creative hack - including visuals and game mechanics. Bought a kick ass game dev machine, vr, consoles, loads of books and frankly, i cant wait to get back into the zone as soon as i am done with my client work. I just love it. The other day i wrote a generic way to interact with virtual lcd screens, code to wire electrical cables and i am considering implementing a virtual scripting language (so players can “program” in game devices and their interaction). Sometimes i spend weeks figuring out how to solve a problem. I hope to turn this into a commercial success but if doesn't then at least i’m enjoying the ride.

So my advice is maybe look into your past at something you loved doing, maybe totally different from your daily job, and pick up from where you left. That past self is still there just needs stimulating i think.

It seems that you want to force yourself to code personal projects, and enjoy it. Why is that? Why not instead look for something that fulfils you and you enjoy without forcing yourself?

We change with time and our tastes change with us. Things that we used to enjoy we don't anymore, and we might discover and pick up new hobbies. You might develop that sense of wonder, discovery and mastery in a completely new field, without the pressure of mixing it with your work.

Coding for me generated a feeling of maximal accomplishment. After completing a hard coding puzzle from TAOCP or any personal itch I’d be able to sleep immediately or get an even stronger uncontrolled stream of inspiration but now it happens maybe once in a few years. (I’m 30 too)

I guess what I’m trying to say is, passion doesn’t have to be one note. Passion has ebbs and flows, but there is always something out there waiting for you.

How many responsibilities are you keeping on your mind? It used to be "school", which is relatively simple: you do the lessons and maybe homework, and spend 2 days before the exam learning. There is a lot of free time and attention to explore and learn new things. Also, the school automatically provides a social environment of people facing the same problems as you do; but at the same time, many of them are willing to discuss school-unrelated topics with you.

Now "work" is more complicated, because on one hand you need to do the work you are assigned, but at the same time you also need to make long-term decisions about your career. (It is possible to get into a blind alley by doing whatever the company needs from you... only to find out one day that your current project is finished, and your knowledge is obsolete, because you focused too much on finishing the old project which used old technologies, and didn't pay enough attention to learn the new ones. Oh my, this may actually look pretty bad on your CV.) You have fewer colleagues than you had classmates, and most of them are probably working on other projects. Most of your colleagues are probably not interested in your work-unrelated interests. But you have fewer time to socialize with people who are not your colleagues.

When you have kids, this introduces a new set of duties: how to feed them, how to play with them, the choice of kindergarten and school, etc. Even less free time.

The problem is that when you find some interesting thing, it becomes more difficult, sometimes completely impossible, to dedicate some time to think only about that thing and nothing else. At school, you can spend half of your weekdays and full weekends doing whatever you want. With job, it becomes evening when you are tired, plus weekends. With kids, it's maybe 30 minutes every night after the kids are sleeping, and no time during weekend; it depends on your situation, what kind of babysitting is available, etc. Of course it is harder to get enthusiastic about something that you barely have any time to do, and definitely no long uninterrupted blocks of time.

It's not just that duties take away your time, but also the fact that they are present in the background of your mind even when you are not actively working on them. It's always the "shouldn't I be doing X instead?" or "only 30 minutes left, then I have to turn this off and do X instead". That distracts and takes away the joy.

When I was a kid (10yo), I loved programming because I can do graphics and audio and other eye-catchy things.

When I was in teens and in 20s, I loved programming because I wanted to show off cool things to friends.

When I was in my 30s, I loved programming because I wanted to make/improve products that customers love.

Now I'm in my late 40s, and I still love programming because it gives a way to disentangle the complexity of this world. I like thinking about social problems in terms of parameters and algorithms. Machine learning is interesting not because of what it can do, but because it gives a new perspective to interpret the world. I see politics news and tend to reframe it as a software design problem, etc. I am now certain that this field is deep enough that I can pursue it for the rest of my life.

Your reason might have changed too.

I felt unenthusiastic working with F2P mobile games and ended up in special education. Pay is somewhat less but the meaning was reintroduced to my life. And its a huge difference for me at least. I'm not a f/t dev so can't emphasize that side but the meaning is a gigantic thing for most of us.

You will find out that most of the time your distractions are because you have so many choices. Limit it, and by not being online all the time is a good way of doing it.

Code whatever. Something that you and only you are happy with. All that bullshit with bad code, low impact and 'has been done' is just taking the Joy out of things.

Code something without the internet turned on. Put on some good music, turn off the lights and get back in there. By yourself. Feel it come back to you slowly. And dance with it

May try a retro computing project. Restore you old PC, code something in basic languages, on a very low powered machine. Exclude any potential revenue ideas from what you are doing.

I found a new job where my responsibilities are now “build everything from scratch because we have literally nothing”, and it’s so empowering to feel that my creative and technical skills are being valued. Consequently I’m way more invested now than I ever was before.

(The converse problem is that if you keep your hobby and job separate, it takes more time. And you need some extra time for dating/family, friends, sport, etc.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874635

I can recommend some book or just write down some pep talk here which is gonna feel good for both of us but perhaps not useful.

The thing I want to ask is about your mental health. Maybe these things you mentioned are part of some mental health crisis you're experiencing that needs caring. Not enjoying the past enjoyable activities is not a simple thing to ignore it.

Thank you for your consideration. My mental state is pretty ok I think, I'm overall cheerful person, it's just that I'd like there to be more meaning than work.

It's been gradual decline in joy.

Movies, no matter how bad, do have the potential for inspiration.

TBH I still enjoy watching Hackers and War Games.

Also see the original Tron.

Im kidding (except ruby part).

#2 (this is serious) stop expecting from your job to make you happy. Its not your job’s job :)

You risking to end up in infinite loop of escapism, instead of focusing on uncovering your true potential.

“So good they cant ignore you” was an eye opening book for me on this matters.

You're a human being, not a human doing.

I'm going in completely opposite direction. Did a lot of expanding on breadth. Now trying to dig deeper into few things to get domain expertise sort of. AI/ML look interesting and blockchain is facinating.

I am also resorting to CS & IT books. They seem fun and motivating too.

Between work, family and obligations, the little time left is not for coding or side projects.

I don’t have much advice to give unfortunately, only an observation. I think this is what happens on an average person when your hobby becomes your work. I noticed last time I switched jobs and I had a 2 month gap, the urge for tinkering and coding came back.

In the meantime, my time off went to other, new, hobbies outside of technology. I’m certain that if I was to make a career switch, after a while, the tinkering urge would come back.

In my late 20s, I felt pretty competent at all the things my jobs could give me, so the only thing I could think of more was to do everything, so I became a technical co-founder. That forced me to understand and own many things that I used to take for granted or only understood tangentially, and that was quite a lot of fun.

Now in my late 30s, I derive joy from mainly two aspects. The first is when I can feel the power of leverage, that I can make a large impact with a small amount of work. So that's a combination of, that my setup and my knowledge allows me to make certain types of changes and improvements quickly, and then that I can see how these changes end up having a lot of value to the company and customers.

The second is when I get to solve a puzzle, so something that I know should be possible, have a rough idea of the end goal, and just having to tease out all the details and everything along the way. So I get that feeling of pushing along the edges of my knowledge, and then the sense of accomplishment at the end. If this puzzle then also has a lot of value to the company and customers, then even better.

Learning something new keeps me going for more than 10 years already. At my job I'm actually system administrator, but actually half of that is coding.

Constantly learning - what affects performance, how to pinpoint what causes perf issues, how to tune up databases, sql-fu, data integration, analysis and how to debug with that mysterious windbg, how to automate stuff, script CI/CD tasks... it all takes time and just gets me excited. With all this I don't even have desire to learn new languages, as C# makes me quite happy, capable and effective.

Lately even looking outside my main domain keeps me excited (arduino, fixing electronics etc.)

If you're coding for yourself, you can code as 'badly' as you want, ignore standards and use your own conventions, come up with your own systems, and make things useful for other parts of your life. You can add bits and pieces as you go, and there's no need to be burdened by what other people think.

I think if you're in a situation where you can comfortably accomplish the work tasks without having to learn anything, and you have to do this reliably, then of course that's going to be boring. - The same state as "nearly finished" the other side project in the CommitStrip comic https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-...

I think a lot of the fun I had when I first start coding was it's very easy to be curious about things, and to chase that curiousity. - One model I've heard for "motivated at work" is it's a combination of autonomy, building mastery, and a purpose/sense of belonging. (Many of the other comments suggest increasing some aspect of one of these). I'd say tech isn't inherently interesting; especially not if you have a pretty good understanding for how some technology works.

After around 15 years as a professional developer, I had that same kind of deflation (I was 33/34 at the time). I took a slight change in role towards technical product management, and enjoyed that for a while. It allowed me to still be technical and engaged with the engineers, but also allowed me to step up and focus on solving customer problems rather than compiler problems.

I did that for 5-6 years while also growing into an engineering manager. I did eng management for another 5 or so years before realising that all my technical skills had trophied...to the extent that although I could hold an educated conversation with the devs, I wasn't really trusted to make changes to the codebase. E.g comments like "Look out! Rexelhoff made another commit!" which were meant in jest but stung a bit more than I'd like to admit. I felt like I had one choice and that was to push forward up the ladder and become entirely hands-off. The anxiety of being discovered as a fraud was off the charts. A fraud developer and a fraud manager.

Around this time I came across Charity Majors's blog/tweets that encouraged engineering managers to not be afraid or ashamed to go into development once again. Not to think of it as a step backwards but being able to do a little bit of this, and then go back to doing a little bit of that...and then at some point later go once again into management with unparalleled experience under your belt.

So I left my cushy senior management position and took a role that had me back on the tools 100% (small start up where I was the only software eng). Leveraging 2 decades of experience and being completely into dev has been the most fun in the two years I've been doing this. Reminded me why I got into software engineering in the first place. The excitement of solving the problem, the challenge of knowing I'm the critical piece that can get it done. Mentoring junior developers. I'm fortunate enough for my manager to have complete trust in me and give me autonomy to just get it done, because he knows I've been on the other side as a manager and that I respect the business's need.

I plan to build up a team in this place. I know that someday I'll outgrow being just an engineer, and I'm OK with that. For now, I'm just enjoying working with a small team and getting shit done.

I did and the joy is back.

Maybe there is some healthy balance, like taking 1 year off after each software project. (By "1 year off" I don't mean vacation, but simply taking another - probably much less paid - job.) But it causes some questions at job interviews.

Then there is the dream of living like this guy https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with...

Now I am working on things that are more aligned with what is important to me, and finding what’s important was hard.

Short version: google "early retirement".

Long version: Even if you make lot of money, consider spending little, and saving as much as possible. Doing this will increase your freedom in the future. You may be able to choose a different, less paying but more enjoyable job. You might even be able to completely retire, and get extra 8 hours a day!

A part of this is knowing how to invest money. There are many scams out there, you need to do some research, but the good start is looking for passively managed index funds ("index funds" = copy the economy, which is generally growing; "passively managed" = you are not spending half of your interest to pay someone to roll the dice). Dunno, you might put 90% of your savings in these, and 10% in crypto. Maybe buy some real estate. The important thing is to invest money and avoid scams. Then watch your savings grow exponentially.

Many people with high income get caught in the trap of increasing their spending accordingly. Sometimes the extra spending provides significant extra pleasure, but often the benefits are negligible and people waste money simply "because they can" and because everyone around them is doing the same thing so it would be "weird" not to. Sometimes reducing your expense gives you as much extra money as having a side job, and is incomparably easier and more enjoyable (cooking your own meals may feel low-status, but you are your own boss, there are no meetings, no Jira tickets, no need to compete with anyone).

If you don't have kids, as a software developer you should be able to save at least 50% of your salary. (Maybe more if you say the Scala paychecks are especially large.) Think about it this way: if you save 50% of your salary, it means that for every year you work, you get 1 year of vacation... maybe more, if your money collects interest. And if you feel burned out now, it's probably not going to get better in 10 or 20 years. In theory, if you can save 25× your yearly expense, and invest with 4% interest (above inflation) on average, the money will last forever. Note that you can still keep working, even if you no longer have to, and you will have greater freedom at job choice, so probably more enjoyable jobs.

So find an interesting new tech, maybe in a new job. It may work for you.

The thing is I began this thing as a wonderful skill to build new things. I was coding in C64 when I was 8-9 years old. But we lose our "mojo" as it turns into a humdrum everyday job where we know our limits. Add in the business related constraints, you slowly begin to develop a toxic relationship. And like any toxic relationship, ending it is better in the long run for your mental health. It was for me.

Taking a long vacay doesn't work if you implicitly know that you will return to the same routine by the way.

Hope it helps.

Edit: Currently working as a general IT troubleshooter guy who is also doing some coding in his spare time.

This means that it doesn't matter whether you particularly like your work. That's why they call it work. What matters is if you are good at it and will you get paid well for it. If you can earn enough money to support yourself and the others who depend on you (if any) by doing something else, do that and cultivate coding as a hobby. Otherwise, keep coding professionally and find joy in other activities, like fishing or woodworking.

Or, you know, rally and protest to convince your government to pass laws for universal basic income and the abolition of private property.

Here is what I stated doing recently and feels like it helps:

1. 15 minutes mediation daily before work starts and 15 minutes after work. This marks the end of a work day and can start thinking about something else.

Lately due to some changes in the company I found myself thinking a lot about work even after working hours. Without being able to stop. Meditation trains my mind to calm down and switch off.

I also feel that I can now switch tasks easier. And my mind feels lighter.

2. Try to reduce the bad stress at work. Refuse nonsense deadlines.

3. 1 cup of coffee per day is enough. Move your body with 30 minutes of running and daily walks.

With the remote working we now have plenty of time. So 15 minutes of meditation across the day is really easy to integrate.

1. Are you mentoring anyone?

2. Are you growing your knowledge? Languages, algorithms, protocols, domains all beckon.

Backend development at that time looked easy (build restful APIs of a database) and all the fun was in the frontend.

So I started focusing on frontend and I ended landing a job a techlead of a small team (6 Devs). This change give me visibility of what are the problems with development, so I started going meta-development. How are we developing things? How can we adapt to the business requirements? How do I keep my team happy and focused? Eventually management saw a value in my work and they asked us to create a team to help other teams across companies branches. I find the joy and purpose not in achieving company okrs, instead in making other developers better :)

It can also be the place where you work - the type of applications (working on something you believe in or is fun is a real motivator), or just the style of the company and management. As you can enjoy coding something on your own, perhaps a new start is called for?

Finally perhaps you've exhausted your love for coding and its time to try something else - project management, design, or something new entirely.

This approach required a lot of courage, because I had to change a lot in my life. At some point I had to even accept that I might end up never coding again. But that proved wrong after several months of being mostly away from computer, reading books, walking, drawing, making yoga, doing all the enjoyable things that came to my mind. In my case F. Perls with his approach to living in here and now had helped me to switch to the new style of life, directed by true inner desires.

This means I tend to focus on product and human efficiency. When I am not being efficient I am focused instead on refactoring because the simplicity provide to one area opens scale in a way I would not have previously considered.

The anti-thesis here is unnecessary pageantry. It’s all the bullshit other developers need to make things easier, such as excess tools, frameworks, decorations, process nonsense, and so forth. These things distract from solution delivery, waste time, and increase required investment.

Creating things for myself alone no longer has much excitement, or only brief bursts of excitement. It used to, like OP notes.

When you were yonger you were backed by somebody providing you food and a bed where to sleep ... you were more relaxed. Getting older means having more responsibilities and spending too much time on projects you simply love but dont’t bring money in is not feasible at all . Of course, it all depends from your lifestyle and how you want to live.

If you are lucky enough to be able to make money from any of your side projects - well... well done;)

What you need is a good listener/friend to debug it together. Perhaps you can track it down. It usually doesn't happen overnight. So you may be able to tell when it has started and what has changed in your life before that.

So now you can’t afford risky endeavors that can imperil your financial stability, you actually need boring and conservative projects.

No offense, I’m also in that boat.

Also, what used to be eye-opening hardly earned discoveries look rather mundane to you today. The amount of work needed to achieve that same level or surprise doesn’t grow linearly.

I still find coding interesting overall. One thing that keeps it exciting is that pretty much every year I do something new. Be it a different architecture or a new language or a new framework.

We all live around technology, and you also work in it, too, so it seems absurd to try to get your love for it back by trying to do more tech, especially in the same way as before. It'll never taste the same, but you're also able to ask more, deeper questions now than at 12. Revel in that so it may rekindle your flame.

If you're in a position to, maybe just take some time off and find something you're particularly passionate about. For me, it's making video games (with an educational slant to be more meaningful and put less pressure on a hobby becoming a second programming job).

You seem pretty strong about programming but what about teaching what you know to other?

It could be a new start. And btw simply by observing, I think the majority of scientists people in some point of time need to meet other people to discuss more deeply of what they are working for and why.

I would be glad to see what you can share about your past experience and further more!

If you are demotivated at work, try to change job. Sometimes changing environment is needed, some teams/places are fundamentally demotivating.

Even if it's a website that converts miles to kilometers or whatever... it doesn't matter. Just build something that you own.

Even if it's the 1000th clone of 2048 or flappy bird. This one will be yours.

Then do it again, and again, and again... until you get better at it and you do not need a job anymore.

Your body is telling you that you need to get a certain job/income so that you become successfully financial so that you can eventually....

I’ll let you connect the dots, in the meantime read something called the book of numbers

We as professionals need to outgrow this childish attitude.

May be it’s a form of addiction (then find a good therapist to work it out).

Maybe just a wrong mindset (then learn alternative views on work-life-carrier matters, and be very critical about most popular ones, like “passion theory”).

we are of the same lol... seriously it's creepy how much story aligns with what I am going through, even ages are almost spot on

First, part of the thrill of coding when I was a kid was the discovering and learning new things. Even making my name flash on a screen was a really cool thing. At the time, coding felt like a mystic art that you had to master through hours of trial and error, and each thing you learned was another building block on your way to understanding.

Now that you're doing this for a job, you know how the sausage is made. You no longer are coding either elementary things (to learn whichever language), or even building things you find an interest in. You're using your skills for the purpose of making a company money (which hopefully pays you well enough to make up for the fact it's draining your own enthusiasm for this craft).

And that's probably one of the biggest things. You're taking this previously magical thing that you used to discover new and exciting ways to build [what you wanted] and using it for very mundane things, or for uses that you just have no passion about. Also, there are a million articles or Stack Overflow questions that tell you step by step what to do. You no longer have one old book from the library and 3 outdated Web sites that kind of talk about what you want to know. The excitement of discovery is lost since all of the answers are flashing on a bill board for you and everyone else.

I was feeling the same way as you from about 1 year ago until just 1 month ago. I also work as doing code (JVM stack and backend, as well). I also have about 3 projects of my own that I alternate between (1 backend, 1 frontend, and 1 that is both). About a year ago (Pandemic time) we laid off quite a few people, which meant all of my energy had to go into picking up a larger workload–effectively killing my motivation and passion for my projects.

Taking a year long break from my passion and projects was a very good thing. You shouldn't have to feel that you "need" to code for joy. That'd just kill the joy. Instead, find something that brings back that feeling of newness and magical curiosity that coding did when you were a child. Something that nobody is telling you what to do, or how to use your abilities.

Take up painting, photography, bike riding, wood crafting, a Raspberry Pi or other hardware (although, let's be honest, there are probably a lot of us who just buy them and leave them in a drawer :)). Even learning how to tend a flower garden would be something that you can pour energy into and feel invigorated when you get the results.

In time, your thirst for creating your own thing with code will come back (it did for me, anyway). And in the mean time, you can feel reinvigorated seeing the benefits of your work come to fruition, and have new knowledge that you can share with other people, or just enjoy thinking about as you go about your day problem solving how to solve your next curiosity.

Good luck! Life should be fun. You don't need to be the "coding as a hobby" person all the time! Feel free to jump around and only enjoy the things that bring you joy when they do that for you :)

It's funny how similar our situations are and i was in the same position as you a few months ago. I quit my cushy job and decide to start working on a side project.

Change jobs, meet new people, work on new challenges... it's part of the cycle.

You should not, you have evolved, and in my opinion you have evolved for the better.

Life IMHO is significantly larger that coding/hacking computers. Just be happy that you have moved on.

It could be any hackable platform - Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Windows, Linux, Android, Tizen, PineTab/Phone/etc..

  * Product manager 
  * Cto
  * Scrum manager

Dart. Elixir. Go.

I'm on about the same constant level of fascination since then, but it's not exactly the same thing that fascinates me. I was first fascinated by simple idea that I can build things I want and nobody can stop me from doing whatever I wanted to do. Later I was fascinated with data structures and how I can use them to do clever stuff (I was even taking part in programming Olympiads in my country, with no major successes - I was never taking it serious enough, it was always fun and not work). I remember my first job - I could not believe somebody will now pay me to work with computers. And so with my first job my fascination started to shift towards actual complexity I was building for my employer, I was thinking how do I make stuff which I can guarantee will work and in the same time I will be able to easily handle if anything stopped working. I was so under-qualified and there had been days I could spend 20 hours in a row battling silly problems and rewriting things to improve them. Later I started working with the team and fascination shifted towards security and scalability of solutions. I had privilege to work with many different persons, some not motivated (and not even hiding this).

Now I'm a simple programmer doing day-to-day work, there are days I'm not impressed with my performance, especially when I have to work with technologies I don't love - when this happens I try to rewire my mind to enjoy the tech I don't love. I won't name particular technologies no to get down-voted ;) for me to identify what exactly makes me feeling mentally blocked was the first step, the second step was to make a mental effort to like what I didn't like. Sometimes I could achieve this by building something on my own with these tools I did not enjoy, other times taking a break for a few days to recharge my batteries and come back with fresh mind. I also have dreams and ideas to build something on my own but to fulfill these dreams I need to remove some road blocks which require money, so earning and saving money motivates me for that simple reason. In the same time what demotivates me most is to get paid for the time I was not delivering much of the value. When I have such day I don't despair but instead remove main sources of procrastination and start fresh next day. My aim is to be happy with myself if I was my own employer.

The reason I wrote this whole story is that sometimes I go back with my memories to remember how was I feeling back then. This can also empower me and help me find ways around my mental blockers.

So, anyway, one of the things I've been wondering most about this situation is this question: When I was younger, was I "fascinated by technology" or did I want to do some things "which involved some technologies"? That is, was technology itself the goal? And I don't know about you, but in my case I'm certain technology was almost never the goal. Maybe some times I would indeed find joy in toying with some particular technology, but in general it was always about something I wanted to do which usually -but not always- involved technology.

That "but not always" was not a casual comment. It turns out I can enjoy other things which do not involve technology (surprising, uh?), or involved it only indirectly. In the last few years, maybe this last decade, I've been enjoying non-technology related activities which still allowed me to do things... to create or to achieve some goal. Like drawing and painting. I'm not very good at it, but I enjoy the whole process of it. About once a year, maybe a bit less, I've been building arcade machines. Sometimes I do all the work myself, others I just buy a -mostly complete- kit and build that. I usually end up selling them cheap or sometimes giving them away after playing with them for a while.

Anyway, it provides a sense of actually achieving something, even if it is of little importance or practical utility. So, my guess here is double: It's not about the technology itself, and it doesn't even need to be practical or useful.

It can be, though. One other thing I do is teach in various ways -mostly online these days-. This is a bit different. Not only because it is indeed useful, but also because the results have been more mixed. I help programmers in various ways. Sometimes it's anonymous, or at least impersonal, just some random person asking for help on some website. Sometimes it's people I personally know, friends, ex-colleagues, who ask me questions about something they are doing and have become stuck or just want a code review of some piece they don't feel too confident with. I even tend to do this at work, when I'm working. I make an effort to make it easy for less experienced developers to ask me whatever they need to.

As I said, the results with this are mixed and this has been actually helpful. Sometimes people -mostly those random people on the internet- don't even respond or acknowledge the help and this is a bit frustrating, not because I want gratitude or anything but because you just don't know. Have I been helpful? Did I just waste my time for nothing? It's hardly a joyful task. Some other people don't seem to learn much. They come back some time later and ask the same or very similar questions. You see them not progressing and you feel like you're not achieving anything. Which you do with other people, because you see them getting into more difficult or elaborate problems and you notice how they are indeed progressing.

Also, this is technology related. It's about programming and software development. And I even do it as part of my job also.

So, anyway, thinking about how these things work out, I would conclude that clearly it was never about technology but about achieving something. Teaching is much more enjoyable when you do get the feeling that you're indeed achieving something and helping someone.

With these ideas, but still pretty much burned out from a recent job, I've concluded:

- Focus on whatever you feel like. It can, but it doesn't need to be "useful". It helps for it to be of little importance.

- Focus on doing something, not on trying some technology. When I draw, I do try different mediums but I never think "I'm going to try gouache" or "I want to try these markers". Instead it's "I'm going to draw this; let's see how it turns out using these markers".

- Whenever possible, try to alternate. Try activities that achieve different sorts of goals, like painting -for myself- and teaching -for others-. Or like something physical and something more "spiritual" -or whatever word you prefer to use there-. This is just a personal impression I have, that the variety helps.

----

I'm sure I don't need to say this but, of course, you may not like drawing in particular. Just try other things and find some you like.

If you don't like your work, why don't you change your job? Because you don't have the courage to exit your comfort zone