You were younger. Every door you opened was a seemingly infinite road in to a wondrous future. Everything existed only in the realm of possibility and promise for you back then.

Now more of your life has passed and a larger proportion of who and what you are is already behind you, fixed and unchangeable. So now your view of the future is that it short, too short, and only getting shorter. Now every door that opens is a potential waste of time and energy, which are now finite and precious resources.

The cost-benefit equation changes over the span of your life. The relative value of things changes. Back then, you would spend any amount of time, just to pass the time on something, anything vaguely interesting really. But now, you would spend any resource just to have more time in which to idly do things. But how can you just idly do things? Soon you will be dust, and the things you have done are who you will have been. You can ignore that as an immortal teenager, but as each decade passes, the spectre of your own mortality looms larger.

Anyway, you probably wanted more concrete answers. But for me, I try to just tap in to that cosy nostalgic feeling where I don't feel like I have to achieve anything, and just find something I can lose myself in to, with no purpose but to pass the time as if time were an infinite resource, there to be wasted. I think, perhaps, you may be getting a glimmer of that feeling from the audiobook, but your sadness about how far away that time is, is taking you out of the moment? Or maybe you just have something else going on in your life, like a soul-crushing job or something like that, and that needs to be dealt with first... Some time and space for reflection might be called for.

This is a really well-expressed comment. I actually felt it. You should write a novel, lol.

Life priorities change, and it's precisely due to time commitments, as you said. I wish more people at my age understood that. Tech time is infinite, you can dedicate a lifetime to it and not be done (look at Stallman). Personally, I've found that while I enjoyed some of it for personal interest, most of it was dictated by corporations. That mobile app you wanted to make? Gotta deal with Apple's $90 yearly developer fee and have a mac to deploy (or deal with ugly expo). Work wants you to learn a new framework? Okay, do it but we've got a deadline in two weeks, so hurry up and learn it after work. Want a pay bump because you got lowballed and found out a newgrad was making the same as you with 5 yrs of experience under your belt? Study leetcode only to be lowballed by another company or have an even worse work-life culture.

I've found personal connections have always been a source of happiness to me; to this day I've fond memories of people I've been friends with since middle school, and I expect to have them when I die. Tech isn't everything, and with the way things are going, can be detrimental to your mental and physical health. Live like a Stallman/Carmack if it suits you, but most importantly, focus on you and your happiness! Time is a limited resource. Most people understand it more as they age (like me), but if you are one of the lucky ones who understood this early, I think you can make the most out of life!

“a larger proportion of who and what you are is already behind you, fixed and unchangeable”

Nothing that actually exists for you today is fixed. Nothing is unchangeable. Your quote and my statements, as for all great truths, are equally true. I’d recommend living the truth of my statements over yours, because it is less constraining and less likely to lead to Depression. The big D, much worse than the big C since it steals your life immediately and directly.

“the spectre of your own mortality looms larger”.

That is just an idea. Your actual death doesn’t exist, for you. You can’t show it to me now. You won’t be able to show it to me after your death. And you won’t be who you think you are now at the moment of death, so you can’t show it to me then. Your own death to you is a mere idea. I don’t recommend becoming obsessed with it. See “the big D” above.

“Some time and space for reflection might be called for.”

A very “heady” approach. There is also meditation, prayer, singing, loving, reveling in the beauties around us and within us, or just planting a few seeds and watching them grow. Painting, sculpting, building a deck, helping a neighbor, hugging your child. Dancing with your mop or broom. Knitting a small car out of steel wool. Sometimes getting out of your head and gaining a much-needed distance from your many thoughts is the better thing.

We don’t know where the original poster is coming from, so I decided to throw out some more options. Your approach for yourself is a “flow”-based approach with some observing (which could be misinterpreted as thinking) elements. The entire catastrophe of human existence is a lot broader than that...we have a lot more doors we can open.

> Anyway, you probably wanted more concrete answers.

That's the best answer!

> Back then, you would spend any amount of time, just to pass the time on something, anything vaguely interesting really. But now, you would spend any resource just to have more time in which to idly do things. But how can you just idly do things? Soon you will be dust, and the things you have done are who you will have been. You can ignore that as an immortal teenager, but as each decade passes, the spectre of your own mortality looms larger.

To get this spirit back, one needs to break free of routines and constraints.

When you are post scarcity, resources and time matter far less. You are free to fiddle with stuff for fun!

Yes, I had this exact feeling & here is my story.

I would go to work every day I feel unexcited about anything and everything. I would sit in meetings and be unengaging, I would be feel unmotivated to complete the work I was doing. New features, bug fixing, planning, cloud migration, interviews you name it and I was just feeling dead inside - and let's be clear this work was cutting edge stuff. The 'buzz' had just packed up it's bags gone.

So I quit work, out the rip I handed my notice in and left. I didn't work for 3 months; I sat and played games, went on walks, looked after peoples dogs, painted the house, read and after about a month I started working on my own projects again.

All of a sudden I found that 'spark' which used to get me up in the morning. Like when I first started programming. So I started working on my projects all day & every day - they're now on hold and I found myself a new company to work for and have never felt more engaged, excited and happy than ever before

Seriously, you may just need some leave everything behind and take some serious time off - sorted me right out

I remember how excited I was when I wrote a few lines of assembly that made an LED blink on a pic14f84, I was super excited the first time I installed Gentoo and worked through the LFS book. At the top might be the first time I used KDE and got X11 working! Oh, and vimtutor!

Nowadays, I've noticed that the moments things get mixed up with money (i.e. programming professionally) the excitement is replaced for at best pragmatism and at worst drudgery.

Thus for me I find excitement in things that I can't possibly think how they can be cash from, like learning Esperanto or Racket, photography, cooking, HAM radio...

It's kind of like when you pay your best friends to help you move and the best friend dynamic changes because you are now his "boss"...

“Guys, it’s taken you 90 minutes to clear out this room. I gave you a 60 minute deadline. I’m deducting one beer and one slice of pizza from your payment.”

STRIKE!!!!

hehe!! Exactly

>HAM radio

Have you tried out Software Defined Radio yet? It's amazing what you can do with GNU radio and a $20 USB dongle. I build a flowgraph that picks up the local VOR Aircraft Navigation Aid, and plots the direction to it, all by reading and experimenting.

You can also play with audio, to get a feel for the otherwise silly concept of negative frequencies, and how they actually turn out to be useful. It's fun stuff.

I took a look but it was very brief given that I broke my RTL-SDR :-D but I was using it to decode FM radio RDS (probably bit more that what I could chew!)

Fortunately, the price keeps dropping, you can probably replace it for less than you originally paid.

I recently sat down at an old computer (2006 iMac) that I had given to the kids for watching DVDs.

I realised it still had Xcode installed. So I opened it and started a new project. And I really enjoyed it!

Something about coding on this oldish Mac makes me happy. I'm not sure why. In theory it's worse in pretty much every way. Many websites have stopped working on the no longer supported copy of Firefox.

Maybe it's because the old machine reminds me of the time when programming was still new to me. Some of my earliest attempts at GUI apps are still on that Mac. Now I see the same tools, but know so much more things I can do with them.

I'm not sure what my point is. I kinda lost interest in new tech as well, but somehow playing with an old computer made me excited about programming again.

I found this to be true for me. I used to be so involved in TC39, framework wars, build systems, I was super-passionate and excited about the work; I loved the inner workings of things and loved making the products and tools I and my team use as awesome as possible.

That lasted for nearly 15 years. In the last two years or so, though, I've realized that management at the utterly enormous corporation I work for simply abused that passion. Things that were "works of programming art" or miraculous deliveries of impossible things became not just expected but demanded. That passion was simply burned out of me. Even when I see something I built in a keynote in front of thousands of people or on a website that gets literally millions of unique views every day, my feeling is, "meh."

The upside is that I've discovered other things in work and life: physical fitness, better work-life balance, and a learned defensive approach to scoping to protect the health and well-being of my team have started to define me more as a person instead of an on-demand voodoo-doctor/wizard/miracle worker. It comes as a detriment to my employer though... I refuse to pull all-nighters every week and my velocity has definitely dropped.

I have a feeling I'm not alone in this experience here. I'm assuming this very shift in perspective is why companies are less willing to hire us greybeards as opposed to fresh-faced amped-up kiddos despite our experience... we just know better.

I have not gotten that feeling back in years, but I do not see that as a problem. I get excited by seeing my children growing up, by exploring the world, seeing new things in nature.

If nothing gives you an excited feeling, that is a problem. But if tech is now just a job to you, and you get excitement in other areas of life, there is nothing wrong with that.

If nothing gives you an excited feeling...

... it might be 2020? :(

Yes, feeling similar. I was dreaming of so many things, but with time I learn how much harder they are to implement than they seem. Computers can do so many things potentially, yet they are so much harder to actually achieve for various technical and political reasons. I wish I had infinite amount of free time to pursue all them.

New gadgets barely make me excited as they used to -- if anything I usually anticipate how I'll have to spend time finding my ways around vendor locks and making them interoperable. Perhaps the only thing that still excites me these days is reading Pinephone news -- really hope it takes off and liberates mobile computing.

> I was dreaming of so many things, but with time I learn how much harder they are to implement than they seem.

This one really kicks me. I tend to start a bunch of ambitious projects that get walled quickly due to costs or complexity. Mind you none of these are side hustles or ever monetizable, but the cost still runs out of hand quickly. It also doesn't help that I find that the skills I need now are exactly the things that I'm not very good at

I found the feeling sort of when I started playing with 3D printing, that led me down a rabbit hole filled with SBCS like Arduino and RPI, plus milling machines and laser cutters. It wasn't quite as exciting as the 1st time I connected my TI to a local BBS, but it was close the 1st time my RepRap started laying down filament.

I strongly recommend doing the Advent of Code. https://adventofcode.com/

There are problem sets back to 2015. You get a problem, and once on solve it, you get the second half, which modifies the requirements to get the second answer.

I've been using Lazarus/Free Pascal, and it's really been testing my limits. Here's my github dump of things https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal

I just heard about it at the start of December, it's been a blast!

The possibilities are endless, just don't get hung up on the cloud and a web based interface for everything... it's a distraction at best, and a trap at worse.

Related question: When was the last time you got excited about technology?

I remember the first time I installed GNU/Linux in my first desktop PC. I was so worry about it because I did not want to broke anything. I even bought more RAM because my machine only had 128 Mb. It was not enough for Ubuntu. After installing it, everything was new for me. Directories are now called places, anything is a file, multiple desktops, compiz, etc. I was very impressed at that time.

Now, we have reached a point where it is difficult to be impressed not because technology is not impressive itself but because we are so used to it.

that Compiz WM was so incredible unstable in the first years. I think another reason was that lots of people (like me) lost their hope on the "Linux year of the Desktop". Today I see far less innovation and "dream ideas" on Linux than I saw 15 years ago.

Go low level. Get back to basics - abandon higher level abstractions (thinking bloated and depressing frameworks). Implement a project that interests you, purely for fun.

I like this! have been thinking about FPGAs and how much fun I had learning them! AU and flip-flops might be a little lower than what you meant tho :-)

> Go low level.

Pick up a retrocomputer and try to do something useful with it, there's a lot of unwarranted excitement to have and it's fairly cheap.

That sounds exciting, indeed! Any particular recommendations?

I still get the excitement from time to time. Don't quite understand the whats hows or whys though. I still work on projects I think are cool, but they continuously seem to stray away from programming while still being anchored in tech. It comes are goes these days. Going back I'd never have gone into this as a career. I'm not particularly good at anything anyway, and it would be nice not to have any pressure, even form myself.

I don't actually remember for sure how excited I was when I was a kid working on my programming projects.

I definitely still get excited about trying new things. It might not be the same level of excitement as it was 30+ years ago but I don't remember.

For me it depends on what it is. Machine learning and AI is probably the most exciting thing. Honestly the small learning assignments and exercises are not as exciting as visualizing the final result of an advanced robot (which I may actually never get to).

But as far as motivation, having an exciting goal helps.

Also I think the novelty matters a bit. Something totally new that I haven't used before.

But I think mental and physical health and other circumstances affect levels of anticipation and such. At least for me. So make sure you are not depressed.

Also I would say age might effect it to some degree.

But I remember when I was a kid the experiments were very direct and pragmatic. There was very little reading or video lectures involved with typing in a "draw lines" program on my Coco 2 from the book and then changing the line color or whatever. And the amount of material I generally covered in a day was pretty small in content but high in novelty. So those things probably affect the level of fun.

I'm in my 50s and in my teens was taken over by that feeling of wanting to know more, and the excitement when I finally got access to use a computer was intense.

I have never lost that feeling and every morning I go into Emacs and look at the code TODO before doing anything else, even having a cup of coffee. And it's so great that today I can do this without even getting out of bed!

This is what I think, but it is not too reflective. It's just that usually, stuff at work can get boring. It's just something you might not get away from, but it is what it is.

However, stuff that I can't do without effort, that is just absolutely fascinating and feels like above my pay-scale keeps me going. Also, finding old but still extremely useful tech (specifically older laptops that I want to use, particularly ThinkPads) are more exciting to find, obtain and repair than any newer laptops/gadgets.

In many ways, this attitude has never changed for me. In one way, it's more meaningful that I can do something for myself with something than something that is just some appliance. I mean, like a smartphone is just a requirement now, whether I care for it or not. (I'd probably want to invest and spend time researching a high quality washing machine, etc. than worry about a smartphone - if the washing machine doesn't have some IoT thing in it, I at least know it only serves me :) )

You have to experience new things. Old things don't get us excited. Do you understand ML, Deep Learning? Deep dive into it, not just in using the library but being able to go low level, that will excite you. I only get that feeling when I learn something really new, then it quickly goes away.

I get that when I read deeply technical stuff that's at my level or above my level. So it just means you're not challenging yourself well enough. It's easy to make really good money in this industry operating below your capacity. That's the problem, challenging yourself a lot will not necessary make you more money unless you really go to a FAANG. So why bother especially as we have now gotten older, with more responsibilities.

I feel that my first years of Internet and computers was kinda like the "Age of Innocence" where you would get to explore something with an enormous potential, still in its infancy, where lots of people like me where trying to figure out what to do with it. Nowadays, referring to the Internet, everything comes with a grain of salt for monetary reasons. I cannot trust in every new technology that comes everyday like I used to.

I think this is one of the reasons why I don't feel excited like before. Plus I think the walled garden mobile platforms also contributed a lot to loose my excitement. I used to be a hardcore Linux fan and I lost completely my hope on Linux Desktop years ago.

I've never lost my excitement, but the majority of programming/tech are off creating worthless nonsense I do not care diddly squat about. When the community was learning AWS, I was created my own data centers for exponential savings; when the community went docker, I learned how to create my own VM and chose to discard the technology for bare metal programming. When the community embraced data science, I'd already had 7 semesters of graduate statistics and was happy as a clam. When ML came into vogue, I accessed working on ML models was above me, so I jointed a team lead by a ML pioneer that needed a super competent support scientist. Don't follow the herd, they're swayed by corporate marketing far too easily. Use critical analysis to earn your own trust, and then follow your analysis.

>Don't know if I can ever get that feeling back. Have you managed to?

Problem solving for me is what is still very exciting. I love fixing things or enabling people to do things they couldn't do before or perhaps better than before.

I'm learning Kotlin so I can write a timesheet program for my wife so she doesn't have to do them by hand. Although I dabbled in golang for years I didn't learn it in earnest until I needed to extend a vendor's app written in the same language.

Similarly I breezed through the MIT Python course as a refresher after I actually had a reason to use the language in anger. Learning new things is fun, don't get me wrong. But I've really found a purpose when I find a way to apply it.

Sort of.

I can't speak to this being a thing that's always possible in professional environments, but the trick was to aim for reduced volume in everything I do. Much less code - and therefore less of a "product" - but much more intense design/conceptualization. Flexing that crystallized intelligence. I am more attuned to deep dives that aren't just muscle memory acts now. If it does reduce to muscle memory I get suspicious about it being automatable.

This means I don't spend the same kind of time within the feedback loop of the tools like I used to. I am not building big systems, but neither am I fighting them as much.

I get excited about new things, but they almost always turn out to be disappointing. So I spend most of my time trudging along getting stuff done and wishing my tools didn't get in my way quite so often.

I suggest reading (or listening to) How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It's about psychedelics. I've gotten back the experience you're talking about when microdosing psilocybin... and it's not just limited to programming.

Remember when you went to a new place or met someone interesting or got to play with a new gadget? You probably remember it as a vague memory but can't recall how it actually felt. It's possible to get it back, to a certain extent anyway.

My story is somewhat different ... it took me more than 25 years to get passionate about programming.

I started the first experiments with BASIC around the age of 12, took programming lessons, but never really knew what to do with it. After I finished my B.Sc. in CS, I hated it with a passion for a while.

I only started getting passionate about it when I discovered computer music and that I can make my own music software, around the age of 30 or so.

Nope. The same magic from the early days is still alive and well.

A big part of that is that at times when my work or some aspect of my life starts to interfere with that, I figure out what I need to do keep it alive, and prioritize that over any short-term incentives.

VR gamedev is pretty exciting for me. There are almost no conventions or good practices, everybody is winging it. It's very greenfield and you work with your own hands and body.

I still get that excitement from new technologies, sometomes even from discovering cool libs for my use cases. For me its just not weeks of researching anymore, making the whole excitement less memorable i guess

I miss things being normal. I still get excited about tech sometimes but the startup, making money aspect has really run into the reality wall. Programming is just a way to earn a check these days...

I get very excited every time I write in Go like I don't in any other language.

I get that feeling. Just getting old I guess.

Aren't you excited by the new Macs ?

No, can't say there's anything in them that really stands out as new and interesting. It's a Mac with an ARM processor. Don't get me wrong, they are nice hardware and the custom silicon and the overall design is beautifully executed. But there's nothing in there that is a must have.

I might get one in a year or so once the software support is more refined. But then again, if I want to develop on ARM, there are thousands of boards to choose from. I already have four on my desk ready to use for whatever, so I'm not exactly lacking choice.

I just got mine and apart from being fast and cool it doesn't feel exciting...

ARM is actually quite far from the user and even from the developer as to be exciting (at least for me)

I almost considered getting a Mac mini, but while the performance gains are cool, the lack of any sort of upgradablity with the new M1s made me reconsider.