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

[py4]

At 13-20 years old, I was very curious and passionate about computers. I spent hours learning computer hacking and exploiting with buffer overflows, taught myself C, C++, linux, python, ... I did a lot of side projects in my 18s.

Now I'm 28 years old, working at a FAANG as a software engineer. It's been a couple of years that I don't have the same curiosity and passion to learn new technical things, outside of work, as I did before. I value and like learning new stuff in my day-to-day job, but thinking about learning a new programming language in my free time does not make me excited anymore.

Is this normal, possibly due to aging for some people? Or is it because all my curiosities have been solved after undergrad, or could it be a symptom of chronic depression as I pretty much don't have craving for anything anymore?

[greendude29]

I noticed a sharp decrease in my world curiosity at 34. This was also the time in life that I accepted a lot of "responsibility" towards the traditional way of life, ie, stable well paying job, career growth, long term relationship, etc.

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.

[py4]

Very interesting view.

[SoftTalker]

Yeah I was still feeling pretty motivated (I hate the word "passionate") at 28 but started to lose it in my 40s. I'm in my 50s now and want to retire but will need to wait at least until my kids are done with their educations.

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.

[lupyro]

I've read similar anecdotes for a decade now. That has really pushed me towards the FIRE movement and kept me there for a while. Only recently have I realized that my position towards my career (don't get attached or financially dependent, you can be laid off tomorrow, aspiring for days of no more work) has had a really negative effect on my life. I've been in a perpetual state of waiting for the future of no work. I spend plenty of time living in the moment but at the highest level my current life plan has been "wait" or "rest and vest". Life has been materially better in every single way but I couldn't shake this unhappiness of "waiting". I also felt very similar to OP. It wasn't until I recently turned down a much better job offer at Amazon and watched Stutz that has made a profound impact for me. Turning down a financially better job at Amazon (to put my sanity and happiness above money) really helped me realize I genuinely have the job I want. Watching Stutz made me aware of the 3 aspects of reality no one can avoid (Pain, Uncertainty and Work). In my mind FIRE was going to solve all 3 aspects for me. I write all of this only to say I agree with you. But for others who find themselves overcompensating by overlooking/hating work that can be just as big of a mistake. Except for this mental shift my life has been mostly the same for the past 5 years, but the past 6 months have been significantly happier.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Right. My passion moved on from being about the technology itself to using it to help people with their problems. Realizing that something that is trivially easy to me can be almost life-changing to someone else is exciting.

[whateverman23]

For me, I just don't see anything exciting in the future for me with regards to software engineering and my career.

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.

[keenmaster]

I’d be depressed if I was one layoff away from six-figure debt. Tech workers living in SF should build up enough savings and a Plan B such that they can easily recover from a layoff. This includes looking at where you live, big purchases, etc… Maybe a CX-5 or a hybrid RAV4 is perfectly fine for one’s needs instead of the Model X. Maybe it’s worth it to get two roommates if you’re in your 20’s - it’s not as bad as you think and you sidestep the scam that is rental prices in SF. Etc etc…

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.

[yunwal]

> maybe the future just isn't bright anymore, and this is a normal reaction.

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.

[0xmarcin]

Something similar happened to me, the magic of programming is gone - now it is just another job that pays well. Personally I moved my interests to stock markets/investing/economy and also philosophy (but only basics).

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?

[worldsavior]

Becoming a father is truly an amazing thing.

[sowbug]

It's normal. However -- and I say this with respect, as it's true for all of us -- you have to realize how dumb you were in your teens. Back then, your brain was about at sharp as it will ever be, but you didn't know very much. Almost everything you encountered was truly new to you in some way. And novelty is fun, especially if you're capable of making sense of it.

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.

[py4]

Interesting take, sad though. I miss that "raw enthusiasm and energy".

[jedberg]

You have responsibilities now, like rent and food. You probably didn't have those when you were 13-20.

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.

[akaij]

> As I often say, when I was young I had more time than money, and now I have more money than time.

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

[Waterluvian]

I’ve been just as passionate as I’ve ever been. What I think helps is NOT working anywhere where you’re just a fungible cog, such as FAANG. Small companies where the founder is hiring you directly to solve a very specific, describable problem.

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!

[snozolli]

Now I'm 28 years old, working at a FAANG as a software engineer. It's been a couple of years that I don't have the same curiosity and passion to learn new technical things, outside of work, as I did before.

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?

[MattPalmer1086]

This whole "passionate" thing drives me crazy now.

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.

[racktash]

After a while, a lot of software development starts to look the same, at least if you aren't working in cutting edge tech. I still love software, but mostly I only write code for work now. In my spare time, I do other challenging hobbies that are quite divorced from software (like fiction writing). I feel this keeps me balanced and avoids my getting sick of software.

[swah]

Heh - I should re-start reading books - I feel like they make like more colorful for me.

[sokoloff]

For me, I think it goes in waves. I went through periods where other things in my life were in disarray or where I had a lot of stresses from having kids and worrying about their future or just plain sleeping less while they were infants and toddlers or when the company I was working for was struggling financially.

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.

[PaulHoule]

For me it comes and goes.

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.

[gghffguhvc]

My passion for tech outside of work extended into my 30s but by late 30s, after having children, it dwindled. It has recently picked back up again in my early 40s as I can view the world somewhat through my children's eyes and their curiosity and creativity is infectious. So my advice is to try to be curious about the world again and if that curiosity flows to building technical things let it take you there, if not it might take you somewhere else just as interesting.

[buggy6257]

I lost passion for _programming_. More recent career situations have led me to the conclusion that I simply cared _too much_ about my work, and it was causing me stress and honestly causing some personality issues too.

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.

[py4]

makes sense. I too have also started to explore more diverse topics including psychology. But I miss my old days. I guess I was 7 or 8 years old when I got my first computer. During these 28 years of life, nothing has ever given me more joy and excitement than learning doing cool edits in windows registry, commands in windows cmd, and discovering features of Microsoft access, when I was at that age.

[solarmist]

This is extremely common but not discussed in technology because it changes rapidly and often happens naturally (but often only at a surface level).

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...

[disadvantage]

> Is this normal, possibly due to aging for some people?

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.

[py4]

The million-dollar question is how to prevent the extinguishment.

[jderiksen]

> Is this normal, possibly due to aging for some people?

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.

[ElFitz]

I thought the same. I was pretty much getting slowly convinced I had to get out before I threw my laptop out the window. I both loathed and dreaded the thing.

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."

[py4]

I feel I have lost my "hunger" and was wondering what went wrong (if any) along the way.

[kawfey]

As a 14 year old I got into amateur radio and I was totally infatuated. That carried on through college. My ham radio experiences and learning helped me decide to get into electrical engineering where I've been blessed with opportunity.

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.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah sure. I think in part it's about doing interesting stuff.

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.

[potta_coffee]

No, I'm a soulless, burned out corporate drone. Thankfully, I've slipped through the cracks and am still getting a paycheck.

[gardenhedge]

Time to go watch Office Space again! :)