Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help
I&#x27;ve been working as an engineer in high paced roles at one of the FANGs for about 15 years now. I&#x27;ve gone through ups-and-downs in terms of what I call &quot;creative energy&quot;, which I will refer to as coding &quot;mojo&quot;.<p>1. You have a limited amount of mojo that you can throw at a problem. When you&#x27;re young, this focus and energy is easy. You can throw it at problems that you may not be that vested in for a reward like money. It&#x27;s also easy to recover. These times are great.<p>2. As you get older, mojo will become more cyclical. When you&#x27;re in the troughs it will be difficult to focus your energy on a problem if you&#x27;re not that vested with it. When you work on projects that fail, this will be extremely draining. At this stage, you will need to build &quot;refresh&quot; mechanisms into your schedule. It will help to work on non-tech yet creative passions on the side that have easy to reach end-states. I personally had this successfully going for over a decade.<p>3. Sometimes instead of being cyclical, your mojo will just totally flat-line. Sometimes it was too many death-march projects, sometimes it&#x27;s personal health related, dealing with aging family members, or the stress of being a parent. If you haven&#x27;t built in a refresh cycle that works for you yet, it&#x27;s going to be very difficult to get your mojo flowing again. At this point more drastic measures are necessary. One piece of advice I heard was &quot;take a break until you get really bored again.&quot;<p>After joining a project a few years ago that caused me to sacrifice my &quot;refresh cycle&quot;, I found myself quickly in #3 as well. I wish I had better advice, but I&#x27;m planning to take some extended time off from the grind. [Advice to younger devs: this lifestyle requires active maintenance on your part to sustain and you won&#x27;t know about this until it&#x27;s too late. Save up and plan for a mid-career break.] I&#x27;m planning on working on some fun projects to expose me to new technology stacks and try to see what problems I can get excited about again and do some self-investments to open up alternative career paths. [I&#x27;ve always considered &quot;retiring&quot; into education at some point but maybe I&#x27;ll play with a few different self-employment ideas first.]