My read is that once you are fully integrated into the "system", it has micro ways of keeping you engaged - working towards that next promotion, buying a new model of your favorite EV, having your stocks vest so your net worth can increase, etc.

Creativity requires freedom to take risk. Post industrial revolution life incentivizes you to not take risks. Overtime, variability of actions goes down as does creativity.

Our jobs are all consuming of our lives - we see it as a moral good to see our jobs as "crafts"; so if you want become a better X, you should not only invest your 9 - 5 in it, but also your weekends reading books about it, your free time doing side projects showing your "passion", found a business so you can ascend into a new social class of "founders", etc.

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

-- Douglas Adams

You become much more cognizant of the ticking clock on your lifespan after you pass 50. You realize you have maybe 20-30 years left (which sounds like not much after you've lived 50), and you don't really get enthused about spending it learning yet another framework, language, or piece of infrastructure.

When I was first starting out, possibilities were endless. Lots to learn, lots to build.

When I was in college, I started getting internships, and dreams of disneyland-like big tech jobs were abundant.

Now, I have the big tech job and everything is objectively getting worse. Big tech jobs are less and less cushy. Jobs are harder to get. Salaries are going down. Layoffs left and right. Promotions and raises are a grind. Etc. etc. Absolutely nothing to look forward to.

People are talking about depression and low-test, but maybe the future just isn't bright anymore, and this is a normal reaction.

Sometimes depression (and maybe low test?) can come from an actual or perceived lack of control. There are tangible steps people can take to make themselves more anti-fragile, and if you have a significant other, you need to be able to articulate why cutting back on lifestyle expenditures is necessary and can actually make you happier/feel in control of your destiny.

I think it's a normal reaction, but there are other normal reactions you could have. Could you be part of the solution? I think people (and software developers in particular) are trained to think that you must be able to fully accomplish something as an individual in your lifetime for it to be worthwhile, but this clearly hasn't always been the case.

I still feel about once or twice a year a need to quickly code a side project but it usually lasts month up to 3 months. In that time I code something that eventually is abandoned, but gives me some satisfaction.

When I was younger I tried things like taking part in CTFs and reading math books in my free time. Now something changed and those things seems pointless to me. Maybe it's the nature knocking on my mental doors telling me it is time to become a father?

If your 13-year-old self met you today, he or she would be astonished how wise and experienced you are. And you'd probably be amused how eager but naive your younger self is.

In some respects, this transition is unavoidable. You're supposed to get a little bit jaded as you get older. You can't be excited forever that today's the day you first saw a giraffe up close or discovered type inference. Eventually people will expect wisdom, experience, and judgment from you, rather than raw enthusiasm and energy. But does this mean your future needs to suck? Not at all.

The key is using your experience to see a situation differently than you would without that experience. Think back to your first week on your current team and how little you knew. What would you tell yourself if you could teleport back to then? Are you taking that advice now? If not, why not?

If you keep applying accumulated experience to your current decisions, then either you'll continue growing, seeing repetitive things differently over time, or you'll decide that your current environment is toxically static and can't stand up to the kind of introspection that you demand, and you'll move on. Either you change your perspective, or you change what you're looking at. Either way, you never see the same thing twice.

As someone almost twice your age, who would give all his earthly possessions to be 28 again, I advise you: use what you now have. Better to have memories of what you did with your youthful energy than to have regrets about how you wasted it reminiscing about your teens.

As I often say, when I was young I had more time than money, and now I have more money than time. I'd rather use my money to buy time, which sometimes means just paying for something that I would have hacked together myself in the past (like a DVR or a piece of software).

I still have plenty of passion, but it's for other things, like stuff my kids like to do, because then we get to do it together.

This observation is subtly touched on in The Dark Side of the Moon, by having Time and Money on different sides of the vinyl :)

I go to work knowing precisely what my work does for those who use it. And I get feedback from those people and live for the moments of “holy shit that used to take 5 hours to do. Now it’s 15 minutes!”

I’m not sure how you can get that loop closure at big well-established companies.

I guess the rub there is that not everyone can be so lucky to not have to work at FAANG. But there are more small companies than you’d imagine!

Why should you? Outside of work, specifically? You probably work eight to ten hour days and have a commute on top of that.

When you were 13 - 20 years old, did you work on programming for eight to ten hours a day, five days a week, 50ish weeks of the year? Probably not.

You've learned so much about programming in your 28 years. There's arguably infinitely more to learn, but it's far less valuable than what you've already learned.

There's also so much more to learn in life. Hobbies, interests outside of technology, travel, language, relationships.

Personally, my passion for programming was killed almost instantly by my first job. I naively looked forward to a future of cooperative work in a team of skilled peers, building great products. Turns out real work is constantly fighting against the apathy and incompetence of others, and management's goal is to force you into submission rather than enable you.

I've always been baffled by this Silicon Valley attitude that everyone is supposed to have some passion project outside of work. I've never heard of another profession where people work full-time and then go home to do more of the same work. How many lawyers go home and then walk around their neighborhood offering free legal advice? How many CPAs go home and crank out some 'fun' tax returns?

It kind of made sense in the earlier days of the industry, before the web and software eating the world.

There was little training or certifications. The people who were available were genuinely passionate about it. It was all new and exciting for those who cared, and very niche as far as most people were concerned.

So passionate became the quality that marked you as someone employable.

These days I don't bother looking at jobs that demand passion. I now see it as a synonym for exploitable.

Then there are upswings where the pure joy of learning something new or trying something challenging in computing comes right back with as much force as I could ever remember there being. (Doing Advent-of-Code in clojure this past Dec was one of those times of nearly pure joy for me.)

I do think it's easier in your first few years out of school because there's so much to learn and you're getting that feeling of progress and novelty every week, if not every day. After a while, you start to have more grind and less shiny-new, but there's still enough enjoyment that I get at not quite (but almost) twice your age.

If you "don't have a craving for anything anymore" that probably is a sign of general depression and you might need to talk to someone, might need to exercise, might need a vacation, or who knows what will help you climb out of it, but if you used to like programming and lots of other things and now you find you don't enjoy programming nor other things very much, I'd wager that it's not the programming part that's changed in that story.

I was a kid in the 1980s excited about 8-bit micros. Today I have days when I am more excited than I ever was about about what I and other people can do with computers and I have other days when I think the 2023 web is all ashes.

I have times when I play a lot of video games and watch a lot of TV shows. Other times I am into literature, art, psychology and soft subjects like that. Other times I do demanding technical side projects. I think I am doing my best when I do side projects that combine those interests.

I think it is good to have a rhythm. One thing I like about being involved in electoral politics is that you can work really hard on a campaign for a few months and then not think about it for two years which helps avoid burning out.

I didn't lose my _passion_ though. I just redirected it. I've taken up woodworking, I've learned a ton about 3D printing and CAD, and my wife and I have our eye on getting a laser printer soon. I've travelled a bit more too, and have learned more about home ownership/improvement than I ever thought I would enjoy (turns out I do enjoy it!). I've started learning more about finance and economics, and took a random dive one weekend into geography so that I could try making a realistic D&D world map that took into account naturally forming rivers, coastlines, mountain ranges, etc.

On top of all that, I have a newborn daughter now and get to pour my passion for all of these things and more towards her as she grows, and getting to learn what it means to be a parent and how to do it better than my parents did (they did a fine job; but isn't it always good to improve?).

I think oftentimes this passionless burnout comes, like it did for me, from attaching too much personal worth to one single topic. May be different for others though.

For academics, there is a common piece of advice to change what you are working on every ten years radically [1] because by that time, you have explored all of the areas that occur to you (low-hanging fruit and your specialty) and that you need an influx of new idea to refresh that creativity and curiosity that you used to have.

This happens in every field and every career. Your options are to continue as you are (and things will stay the same), to learn something at a much deeper level by becoming a specialist (which only partially addresses what you described), or to change areas/fields (this can be as simple as backend -> frontend/mobile/OS/etc.) and start over.

Only the last one is guaranteed to relieve your feelings, but it comes with all the negatives and insecurities you had when you first started.

#2, you've solved most of your curiosities, and it takes more and more work to dig deeper to refresh your interest if you keep doing the same things. It could be the others, but your wording makes me strongly feel it's #2.

As far as depression goes, a lack of curiosity is the first step toward depression, but not indicative in itself. Everything becomes familiar with enough exposure, but not finding new things to be curious about means you're in a rut.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/scientific-swerve-ch...

Be careful not to get set in your ways. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. Treat coding like a new adventure, as if you were 13-20 again just discovering new things for the first time. Never let that spark be extinguished. Fuel it.

Yes, possibly. When I worked 40 hours / week I had very little energy or interest in creative pursuits as I approached my 30s. This is part of the reason that I work 30 hours / week now.

> Or is it because all my curiosities have been solved...

This may very well be the case. I love music and pursue it with great energy but as I learn new styles, new instruments, try new ways to perform, etc. I find less and less satisfaction and magic. I still find enough in it that I continue to pour a lot of time and energy into it.

> ...or could it be a symptom of chronic depression as I pretty much don't have craving for anything anymore?

This could very well be the case. If you haven't talked to a good therapist I would recommend doing that.

And then Stability dropped Stable Diffusion, with all the messy and impressive effervescence that followed. And OpenAI released Whisper and opened access to text-davinci-003.

Now I feel like a kid again. All the new things I can make, that before would have taken ages and required to catch up on tons of boring domain expertise. All the new interfaces and UXs possibilities that have just opened. It’s almost magic.

It will probably become my new normal, I guess. By It pretty sure there will be something else by then. I just have to make sure I’ll still have an open and curious mind when it happens.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."

But I’m afraid a random stranger on the Internet wouldn’t necessarily be in the best position to help you here.

Nonetheless, reaching out is always a good idea. If only not to feel alone facing whatever the day’s struggle is.

Personally, I’ve just started trying wave.ai. No idea if it’s worth it yet, but I’ve heard great things from people whose opinions I usually find worthwhile. I just hope it might help with the long term.

Now as a 31 year old, it doesn't interest me as much, and in fact drains me to do some of the things that past me was invigorated by. Still seeking that former passion.

To be real, I'm not at all passionate about my dayjob. I do what I do because I get paid. I would not do any of it if I didn't get paid or didn't need to get paid. I do a good enough job not to get complaints about the workmanship, but not much more. The truth is I get paid the same regardless.

Recognizing this, I work less. Part time. 30 hour weeks. Saves some sanity toward things I do care about. A lot of people seem to be working themselves to the bones trying to save up some nest egg to retire early. I just don't have that faith in the future I guess. Seems like an awful lot of eggs in one basket. All I know I might be run over by a bus next week, or die of a heart attack at 42. At least then I'll die having lived a little, rather than having postponed life entirely.

All the while I'm every bit as passionate as I've ever been about building Marginalia Search. That's like a fractal of interesting problems, by design. The more I work on it the more ideas I have. At this point I have probably years' worth of plans and ideas, and how well I realize them has a real impact on the project. It's completely different. Very foreign from how my dayjob works.

In the end, it's sort of paid off. Having a project like this has created a lot of opportunities I wouldn't have if I was working 60 hour weeks hoarding money until some time later.

I'm 41, I have wonderful family, I live in a safe rich part of the world, my job is challenging and fun, relatively low stress, job offers are plenty full, should I want to do something else and I generally happy with my life, but I am passionate about NOTHING.

Every so often a fun idea for a coding project pops up, either for work or just for fun. Sometimes it's a DIY project, and that keeps me entertained for a bit. I'm just not passionate about those idea and projects. I don't recall ever being passionate about anything the way the internet and society leads me to believe that I should be.

You can liken it to women who expects a prins in shining armor, riding a white horse, to come and carry her away and only he will know her true self, her most inner feeling. You tend to get disappointed if that's your baseline expectation.

I'm as passionate as I ever was, which is "not much". I have interests and beliefs, both in terms of work and life, but they where never passions.

what it's like to work towards a long term relationship (marriage) with a significant other

what it's like to raise a family

I'm always impressed when I see how productive people are online with coding projects/hobbies when they are 35-55 and have a family/children. It seems daunting to be able to manage both.

1. I'm financially in a good place.

2. I work hard but don't have an all-consuming job. I'm also much more focused on the work around me then looking only upwards towards the next promotion.

3. I've 98% given up the idea of going on to a PhD, which means learning is really fun and only on topics that I find super-interesting.

4. There are a lot of things that I never knew, and feel I should have learned much younger, but now I don't feel any shame in revisiting "first principles"

5. I have a balanced set of interests that are both technical and non-technical, as well as intellectual and physical.

6. I think I'm starting to understand that IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FUN!

Big believer in software, and am looking forward to seeing what comes.

The industry is now way too big to understand the whole, so I have been staying in a fairly narrow lane (GUI apps for Apple systems).

But these days, the passion is tempered with a great deal of realism. Also, I have come to understand that people [make|spoil] everything. The people involved with a project or technology are just as important as the technology, itself, and can either do great things, or turn it all into a puddle of sludge.

Once I realized this I lost almost all of my passion for anything. I don't program outside work, I am by-and-large a luddite when viewed externally. I absolutely hate new technology and learning about it. It took over a decade of industry work grinding me to the bone and destroying my passion to do this. I wouldn't be so cynical, except that because I work 8-10 hours a day I don't even have much time pursue a replacement passion. I exist to serve. In this light "depression" is really a survival mechanism. If you start having hope of becoming something better after you leave school you'll just watch it be dashed right in front of you by some tech-moron you're working for. Or worse, the non-technical person turned "programmer".

I'm now a independent contractor that works about 40 hours a month, but I am not enjoying it. I still really enjoying tinkering (I have an Unraid server that I spend a lot of time messing with Dockers and VM's, etc) and technology news and advancements, but the daily grind of making someone else rich is old and tired, just like how I feel haha.

I started building a new career on the side that I started as a side hustle several years ago and it's finally starting to become viable as an income replacement. I really enjoy it, I can't even call it "work", because it doesn't feel like work, it's just something I want to do. I guess it's the difference between doing something you want to do, vs doing something you feel you have to do. It pays a lot less, but has the potential for more later on. I'd be happy to do this for the rest of my life and never retire (and I should be able to manage into old age, barring anything major), so I don't worry about the money aspect much. I could likely quit the IT now, but it greases the wheels, but I will likely cut it down to only the occasional project this year.

I'm not sure i'd call it a craving (I spend a lot of time on it, but certainly not all my time), I like playing video games, other hobbies like reading and journaling, going out to dinner and walks with friends, etc.

Not sure what my advice is, but maybe consider scaling your hours back, and filling that time again with side projects. I know I certainly would not have the energy anymore to do IT full time, as well as devote my time to a side project again.

I haven't lost my passion for computers and programming at all, though. They are still my primary hobby and I am as excited as ever when doing that.

I worked at a FAANG and found it absolutely soul sucking. I hated the code bureaucracy.

I hope to go out on my own soon doing an AI related startup.

But I'm in a big company and my last boss stimulated creativity. My new boss is very process-driven. ITIL crap, stuff like that. Hiding behind stupid RACI matrices and tickets.

I think I'm just going to look for another role. Or another company.

I was passionate about programming when I didn't do it 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week, most weeks of the year. It was a fun, new thing and I could spend my free time on it. Now, I spend most of the day on it and want to do something else when I clock out. Also, I already have some trainings on the job and anyway we're always trying something new so I already learn technical stuff anyway.

A couple of times a year I have some non work-related problems and decide to solve them coding stuff, but I still view them as chores, as much as changing a lightbulb or painting the porch.

I find the ongoings of the IT world very interesting at the moment and think if I should get myself fired to play with all the new tools and ideas they induce. Not optimistic about the prospects of the society in general, but it has never been as interesting in IT...

I've been a full stack developer for some years and now that I'm learning more about blockchain, my curiosity is increasing!

Programming also involves thinking, and creating new projects you're "passionate" about, or solving cool challenges. Try to find out what makes you happy in programming and use that.

Or maybe, programming is not for you. Your mind can change a lot in just a few years, just do some thinking.

Ha! You haven't gotten that old yet, or you'd never believe that!

In life? Nope. I keep finding new passions. Picked up the guitar after years of not playing and my creativity is born anew.

In guitar, posture, a good drum throne (roc-soc high stool with the back) and a more ergonomic guitar (Strandberg Boden) has allowed me to play as long as I'd want to daily as opposed to slouched over in a chair or on a couch with a Les Paul (that shape further exaggerated my slouch).

Similarly, good posture, an aeron chair, a good bright monitor with a monitor arm and a splitboard (UHK) has saved me from the aches and pains. My prior setup had me seriously wondering if I needed to start seeing a specialist for occasional numbness in one of my hands.

I also play electric guitar so it's easier to play generally.

I am still personally curious about products useful in my own life, like 3D printers or homebrew Lepton based thermal imaging.

I think most people start out with idyllic visions of what something is, only to have a more realistic view after some time. I think that's normal.

The answer is, sometimes. I guess probably never "as much as I used to be", no. I've got a family now. Given X hours of free time where I could spend it with them, and choosing programming? Nah. But, from the hours of 9pm to midnight-ish, when the house is asleep? Here we go.

Coding is my job. To that extent there are limits, both to effort and passion. I'm not necessarily a "live and breathe for your employer" guy, just because I will often work on code late into the night. I am and have always been a, "If I can solve this problem by writing code for it, I want to do it" guy. That's my choice. I don't feel like I'll get fired if I don't. And I don't feel competitive with the engineers half my age that know twice as many new languages and frameworks.

Coding is also what I love. I love getting things out of my head and making them into reality via code. It doesn't have to be a big thing. I wrote some code to make my predictions for the football pool. I won. I know very little about football. That was fun. I have a side gig where I make merch. I wrote some code to generate t-shirt layouts. I have a zillion little projects like that. I'm passionate about those things because that's me choosing to express those ideas in code, whether to make a buck, or to make my life a little easier, or sometimes just because I had the thought and wanted to see if I could make it work. Nobody makes me. I don't get passionate about tasks other people assigned to me.

Whenever my wife sees me at the computer she tends to call it work. I typically point out the difference because sometimes it technically is, sure. And I can turn that off when it's dinner time or what have you. But often I'm at the computer because I want to be. It's relaxing to me to have hands on keyboard. This might garner some eye rolls, but consider a painter who sets up an easel in the park and charges $10 to paint tourist portraits. That's using your skillset as your job. But is he passionate about that? Unlikely. When he's done for the day does he put away his brushes and think, "No more of that until tomorrow morning!" Probably not. He's probably just as ready to get up early the next morning and go paint the sunrise, just because he wants to.

Not to say my code has ever been art, by any measure :), but that just because you use the thing that you have a passion for to support yourself, doesn't mean you have to lose your passion for it.

A lot of the misgiving and frustration with specific fields is really with the society and what it rewards: we live under nation-states, and within those, regardless of what the political system calls it specifically, what the state says deserves credit gets credit(funding, official titles, legal protections etc.) As a consequence a majority of big ambitions, artistic statements and such are just a matter of chasing after that, being "head of the class" and vocally believing whatever things are deemed Good For the Nation at the moment, and going on to build products and develop technologies that support and enable those beliefs(as your most wealthy and fanatical customers are likely to be true believers). Which will all change with the next crisis or election as the rules shift and a new set of beliefs rise up to the top spot. It can make a soul very cynical in short order, and it produces emptiness once you've reached a FAANG level of material satisfaction.

What we're ultimately building all the ambitions on are the "big three" of mathematics, science, philosophy. Studying those is generally virtuous, and you can definitely spend forever on them. But you can also "go wide" into the arts and sample bits and pieces of academic ideas as you need them. I've gotten really into cartooning and the whole idea of that is to go wide and simplify - take complex reference materials, copy them, understand them, break them down, put them back together in a more symbolic form. Communicate ideas that aren't clear, more clearly, finding new metaphors for them.

One of the rules I live by now is that on average, my day is better by seeking ordinary contentment instead of "big ups". Big ups lead in the direction of immaturity since they mostly involve paying for some kind of high-profile consumption and avoiding visibly hard work. But ordinary contentment is in just taking a small thing and fixing that, even if it's temporary or difficult in the moment. It can be the difference between "$50 storage container that adds a slight convenience for the next 30 years" and "$500 gadget that goes obsolete next year". And that carries over to stuff like programming in that most of the new stuff in programming is going to turn out to be a gadget, something used for a few moments of history and then discarded for the next big thing.

Sit down somewhere and simply watch other people going about their day, and daydream.

Write to your friends and try to meet them regularly.

Get a paper notebook and a pencil or pen and keep it by you. Write ideas and thoughts as they come, not later. Write about what interests you and what you would like to happen in your life. Write ideas for personal projects and break them down into small items that you can do to move them forward. Tick them off as they get done.

Spend time doing things other than programming. Draw. Take photographs with a digital camera and make sure to look at them after some time has passed (a few days to a few months) and mark the ones you like and put them in a folder. Play an instrument made of wood. Go to a concert or an art exhibit. Drink a beverage in a place that feels cozy. Seek out and listen to music that you like and watch movies that you like.

Play video games that you like, especially ones with good sound and good humor, and cooperative PvE ones with friends. Some good ones are Zelda Breath of the Wild, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Everything, Noita, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Arma 3, Broforce, Jagged Alliance 2, Watch Dogs: Legion, and GTA Online in private lobbies with friends.

Beware of sociopaths. They are few and far between, but can also work at FAANGs. Read The Psychopath Code by Pieter Hintjens.

Spend time in a park or a forest walking and listening to the sounds that trees and birds and other things make. Seek out nature.

Try exercising at least once every other day. Search "7 minute workout".

Practice cooking something you really like yourself, and once you make a version you enjoy, make it a habit to do it once a fortnight or so. Go out and eat your favorite junk food once in a while, too.

Read books made of paper about things that interest you. Use a pencil to draw lightly on the pages around the passages you like. Try a book like Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti and A Village Life by Louise Glück and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Always work on your own projects, at least in your paper notebook or in your mind or on your computer, even when at work working for someone else.

Don’t worry about what other people who are not dear to you say. In the end, it doesn’t matter.

Love someone. Help someone. Be kind.

Good luck!

...

[sighs]

[backspace][backspace][backspace]

"No."

(1) Computer technology and computer programming. This portion does not fundamentally change much. At the end of the day, all our code is running on some kind of Von Neumann architecture hardware, with a C-like ABI, on a 1970s paradigm Unix-like OS based on identity-based access control, that pipes and transforms, displays, and persists data. Given how fad and fashion driven computing is, the vast majority of the change isn't innovation, it's just surface-level change (Change != Innovation). There's very little real deal change in computer technology these days. Refinement yes, step change no.

(2) Domain knowledge. The great part about the second part is that whereas (1) does not fundamentally change very much, software is applicable to pretty much anything, so there is always ample room to explore interesting topics. I like to use side projects as a way of exploring new topics and finding new fields to try my hand at. Even e.g. game development with all the technological wizardry that goes into game engines and tooling is ultimately about creating compelling interactive experiences and entertainment at it's best. At it's worst it's about creating attention-thieving rent-extracting Skinner boxes.

On part (1), I think a big source of the complexity of modern software is the fact that we're trapped in a local maximum that's no longer fit for purpose. But in keeping with established things, big players in any industry--including the tech industry--hate nothing more than real innovation or invention. Couple this with massive amounts of inertia, it makes it really hard to meaningfully explore alternative software systems paradigms. It's a rotting pile of awful, but a pretty darn useful one for a lot of people, so here we are.

In particular, there is a quadfecta of ideas I am thinking of things along the lines of: (a) Capability-based operating systems. (b) Interactive software systems. Things along the lines of the LISP machines of old, Smalltalk, Self, Luna, Erlang, Elixir, and Unison. That is, the idea of software systems as living interactable artifacts. (c) Content-derived code versioning and (binary) reproducible builds. (d) Programming language designs based on linear logic, affine logic, or other kinds of separation logics (Rust, ATS, Austral, and others).

The set of four ideas above have the kernel of some very different paradigms for interacting with and creating truly robust and resilient software systems. Unfortunately the first three ideas also have a very long history of failing to gain traction going back to the 1980s. My sense is that software engineering as a field is in a gnarly state of arrested development (that makes most of us miserable at least some of the time), and the quadfecta above is a big thing that keeps me passionate about it. It's a deep well of idea to explore, and one that keeps me out of apathy over the current state of affairs in computer technology. There is a huge amount of latent potential in software engineering and computer science that feels like is just being left on the ground, even when it feels Sisyphean to bend over and pick it up for the umpteenth time.

On part (2), given the circumstances around part (1), my interests have on another axis shifted towards computers as media for creative expression. In other words, computers as a tool for doing other things. I tend to lean more digitally vegan (in the sense of Andy Farnell's 'Digital Vegan') in my daily life, so I can get to the business of using computers for creative purposes. Of course I still end up doing a lot of tinkering anyway, but that's how things go sometimes. In that sense much of what I like about computers has evolved from the technology itself, to what I can do with it or create with it instead. The beauty of the essentially universal applicability of computer technology is that one's career can always stay fresh by changing business domains. Skill set (1) is pretty stable, so one has a nice stable place to stick a foot while exploring around with skill set (2).

TL;DR it's natural for one's interests and passions to ebb, flow, and evolve. It's called being alive.

The nature of evolution caused us to be hyper aware of danger. New things can be dangerous -- old things are safe! Safe things can be ignored.

Your brain literally ignores the clothing on your body after just a few seconds of wearing it. Your nose (for those of you with a large schnozz like myself!) disappears from your vision -- your brain says, "That never moves, I don't need to see it," and erases it from your vision. If you focus, you see it, but if you don't... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All of this is to say that common cliche we've all heard: variety is the spice of life. Passion is shorthand for your brain paying particular attention to something. When you are excited about something, it's because your brain thinks "Hey, if I don't pay attention to this, I might miss something important."

So the key? Variety. Spontenaeity. Try new things. In the world of computers, you may have solidly mastered programming, but try messing around with hardware. Try learning a brand new technology -- not just a new programming language, but a whole new way of thinking. If you're a backend engineer, try and build a mobile app. Consider experimenting with the new AI stuff that's the current rage, or explore retro computing.

Also consider expanding your repertoire -- the world is bigger than computers! (Join us in /r/outside!) Take up hiking, take up running, take up flying kites or canoeing or drinking a beer from every brewery in town. Join trivia nights, find friends.

The more you do the same (or similar!) things over and over, the more your brain thinks "That's not important," and the ho-hum becomes the hum-drums, and then you start thinking, "Do I have depression?"

Maybe you do. I'm not a shrink. But in my experience, and while working with my therapist, I've found that this working from home thing 100% of the time, and doing the same exact routine with my life every single day, has caused my brain to say "This is dull," and therefore I feel depressed.

I've started going into my work's office once a week. My wife and I go to trivia night once a week. I run or work out every day, but with different activities. I think of ways to give my dog novel experiences, too!

TL;DR: Passion is your brain on fire, but your brain doesn't catch on fire if it's safe. Mix it up. Inject variety. Your brain will thank you later.

(Disclaimer: I am not a therapist, and this is just my opinion. I hope it helps.)

People are very interesting, consider them.