Ask HN: Are you as passionate as you used to be?

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.