Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
I hope you can see that you&#x27;re not alone based on the myriad responses in this thread. Always a great read whenever it comes up.<p>Burnout goes back to one&#x27;s childhood and more specifically its effect on how one define&#x27;s one&#x27;s ego and the attachment to it. Young children do not have any real intuition about how to navigate life and are thus beholden to the influences around them. Through seeking approval from these influences (parents, teachers, or even fictional characters), children begin the process of simulating what those influences will say or think of them in order to gain some sort of reward (one&#x27;s parent saying they&#x27;re proud of you) or avoid punishment.<p>The healthy form of this is people who still allow their true self to come into being amidst all of these influences and mental simulacrum they may have adopted while growing up. The few people who are lucky enough to have the stars align for this seem to just effortlessly glide from success to success (at least in my own very limited experience), though that isn&#x27;t to say they&#x27;re always great human beings. For example, one of my relatives was a real maverick in the field of anatomy and had myriad interests and hobbies that he pursued to semi-professional levels, but it turns out he was almost completely uninvolved as a parent and was quite the angry drunk until a few years I was born and I never knew until he passed.<p>Due to the immense pressure we all feel to succeed, as measured by external markers of success (first grades, then degrees, then money, then your kids&#x27; grades, etc), I don&#x27;t think most of us who feel burned out ever had the opportunity (or did and didn&#x27;t recognize it &#x2F; take advantage of it) to know our true selves and interests. Instead, we only learned how to fine-tune the mental simulacrum of our mental judicial panel (of our parents, mentors, random famous tech people we admire or envy) as a fragile mechanism to achieve an external definition of success, often while ignoring or avoiding our own interests.<p>When I feel stuck or burned out, it is always because this mental judicial panel I&#x27;ve constructed in my head is trying to convince me that I will &quot;definitely fail&quot; at some new attempt (e.g. learning $NEW_LANG or switching to some exotic Linux distro and rice the hell out of it) because the easiest path I have to pleasing these judges is to only do what I am almost certain will to garner their approval (e.g. by churning out one more feature for dumpster fire that is my project at $BIG_CORP) or literally do nothing at all, to take the safe route.<p>To me, this is the ego, this enmeshment with your True Self and this mental judicial panel cemented long ago that no longer is working, but is so hard to recognize much less to change one&#x27;s relationship to this panel.<p>The dysfunction is that this panel would much rather conserve energy by keeping you stuck (as the cognitive load of learning something new is very high in calories). I don&#x27;t think burn-out is a lack of motivation, but actually a perverse aim of a high level of motivation towards _not_ doing anything new. It&#x27;s very hard to disbelieve one&#x27;s thoughts and observe them, so the level of self-berating that goes on when one even attempts to think about trying something new is often deafening, even if you are genuinely interested in it.<p>However, this realization never did anything for me. Sure it&#x27;s good to meditate and therapy is helpful, but the only things that helped are:<p>1. doing the smallest possible things I can do to step towards who I truly wanted to be. One minute of meditation? No problem. Writing &quot;auto main() -&gt; int { std::cout &lt;&lt; &quot;Hello world\n&quot;; }&quot; for the Nth day in a row? Easy. Doing one pushup? Simple. The key insight for me was that it wasn&#x27;t about the outcome of the small action, but the slow changes in how I view myself. The slow momentum of seeing myself invest in minute ways into long-term well-being was what I was truly building. Having faith in this process while picking myself up from failure is hands-down the hardest thing I&#x27;ve ever done in my life, but it does beat hopelessness.<p>2. teaching oneself to be okay with failure. After some time of success in coding &#x2F; IT, the aversion towards trying new things often comes from an aversion to &quot;failing&quot; at it. If you think about it, it makes no sense that a web developer should just effortlessly be able to home-run a back-end Haskell app, but the enmeshment of one&#x27;s ego can cause that unreasonable expectation to rumble around one&#x27;s subconscious and almost always dissuade one from trying something new. The only way to learn this, in my own experience, is to try something in a new domain where you have little to no expectation of success and just _play_. Things that often work (at least based on reading this thread and many others like it) are either musical or, more often, some sort of physical craft (e.g. welding, woodwork, fixing up a motorcycle, easy embedded projects, cooking). What these will teach you is that it&#x27;s okay to do something &quot;good enough&quot; for a first draft and that that&#x27;s perfectly okay. The same mental voice that says &quot;god I can&#x27;t believe you don&#x27;t understand the difference between an l-value and r-value. How stupid are you?!&quot; will lose its power once you can truly appreciate the taste of a steak you may have under-marinated and over-cooked or a motor that sputters back to a smokey roar on the salvage jetski you&#x27;re repairing despite the fact that it idles too high, has blistering paint and flaking decals, and is underpowered. These experiences help tamp down that voice of unreasonable expectations of &quot;instant perfect&quot; through the repeated small, undeniable successes in other areas where this voice is not as strong.<p>3. stop reading news that doesn&#x27;t have a high chance of actually helping your day-to-day life. New tutorial on HN about something you&#x27;re interested in? Check it out! Some twitter war about &quot;California vs. Texas&quot; as some high-profile figure &#x2F; company talks about moving to Houston &#x2F; Austin? Best to just close the tab unless you&#x27;re actually into real estate or something.<p>4. If you&#x27;re trying to read personal growth books &#x2F; blogs to understand what&#x27;s going on, avoid any resource that either a) doesn&#x27;t teach you anything new or b) tries to make you feel good &#x2F; inspired. These books are often written by people who put their stupid face on the cover and are trying to just sell vapid, repackaged advice in a terribly-written book as a way to get lucrative speaking gigs where they earn boatloads of cash spewing the same banal platitudes. These types of books tend to not only not teach you anything, but leave you feeling worse because you can&#x27;t seem to &quot;bootstrap&quot; yourself out of burnout or depression like these books portray as an effortless act.<p>God knows I struggle to do all of these things on a regular basis, but these are the only things that have helped me amidst a sea of unhelpful advice (e.g. &quot;join crossfit bro!&quot;, &quot;go keto&quot;, &quot;start doing BJJ&quot;, not that any of those are bad, but can often be used as an emotional crutch to avoid addressing an emotional problem) and loads of stupid self-help books I have found are useful.