[easp]

As others have said, it sounds like you are burned out and depressed.

There are various ways to recover, but there is a good chance it will happen again unless you make some changes.

A good start would be revisiting your dream.

How old were you when your dream took hold? It sounds like the seeds were planted when you were a kid and probably in full bloom by the time you got to college, and was in hand what, within 5 years of graduating?

And then what happened? You got an inkling that your dream and reality weren't well aligned. Still, you held on to the dream, blamed circumstances, and tried a new project, but that didn't do the trick.

It doesn't seem though like you've considered the obvious: of course reality doesn't match your dream, your dream was conceived by a teenager! Of course you were off the mark!

Forgive yourself for not having it all figured out. Realize that the stuff that you thought was so important and interesting was only part of the picture. Realize that your previous enthusiasm wasn't wasted, that many of the things you invested in still matter, but that you have gaps to fill.

Realize too that missing the mark with your dream is actually a huge opportunity, because that old dream was limited by your narrow experience. You now know more about the world. You now realize that there are whole aspects of the world that you are ignorant of.

Think of how much you have to learn, how much you have to discover! Realize that this takes a huge burden off you, off your work, your career. Work doesn't have to be the source of all the meaning in your life. Realize that its Ok if some days, weeks, or even months, you are just working for the paycheck, just working so you can find meaning in something else.

Once you've changed the place your work occupies in your life, don't be surprised if you find yourself looking forward to it again.

As for how to get there? Start changing things in your life, anything at all, but particularly things that bring you into contact with new people. Every little change you make shifts your perspective. With enough shifts, you'll suddenly realize that you see new horizons where before you only saw a blank wall.

Oh, and you are right, a lot of things in software are unnecessarily complex, the result of people not learning from the mistakes of the past, of people adding abstraction to hide complexity, only to produce more complexity, of people who don't know what they don't know ignorantly, arrogantly forging ahead, and, of course, the detritus of shifting business strategies in a shifting landscape. Some of this is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities to clean up some messes and avoid making new ones.

Good luck, you've got time to figure things out, until you don't, at which point, you aren't.