Ask HN: I'm a dull person since software doesn't excite me anymore. What to do?
Now I&#x27;m humming that Father John Misty song that goes &quot;people are boring, but you&#x27;re something else completely...&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t much of a cheer up but lots of people are dull in this sense. Maybe they&#x27;ve worked at the DMV for 40 years. Or they&#x27;ve been dealing with local politics all their life. Maybe they have a hobby but in all likelihood that&#x27;s boring, too—tell me more about your ski trip or your pottery...<p>In first person, skiing is awesome, but it&#x27;s useless for being an &quot;interesting person.&quot; Some people are interesting from a varied life experience, and some people bore everyone to death with their fascinating anecdotes. There are other factors and the focus on having &quot;wasted one&#x27;s life&quot; is, I think, a red herring.<p>Because the real problem doesn&#x27;t seem to be how to be interesting but how to be <i>interested</i>. If you&#x27;re moderately burned out then your capacity for interest fades. Enjoyment becomes less enjoyable.<p>I sometimes watch a video with the psychotherapist Adam Phillips who talks about the need to find one&#x27;s appetite. It&#x27;s a good notion because it&#x27;s counter to the quasi-Buddhist ideal of non-desire that&#x27;s floating around, and it&#x27;s also not just telling you to &quot;enjoy&quot; yourself in the obvious ways—but to really locate your appetite as if you don&#x27;t really know where it is or how it works.<p>I would suggest that boredom with software can be a useful attitude. The proliferation of infrastructural complexity doesn&#x27;t benefit end users, and for any given purpose there is value in minimizing the amount of necessary software to achieve it. Code is technical debt; that&#x27;s why everyone loves to remove lines of it.<p>So your incentive as an engineer who sees software as a burden is in many ways aligned with good business. This might make you curious about ways to simplify and write less code. That&#x27;s a huge topic and the focus of some of the smartest people in the field. Maybe it&#x27;s even the primary topic of computer engineering.<p>Townes van Zandt sang &quot;life&#x27;s mostly wasting time,&quot; but I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s mostly dealing with bullshit and problems. Work is like this: something is messed up and you need to fix it. There may be a grander vision motivating your work, but there will always be days when that&#x27;s far off and you&#x27;re just down in the muck with your hands dirty from CORBA stack traces and horrible complicated &quot;logic&quot; (to use the industry euphemism for the growing accumulations of special cases and workarounds). At this point it&#x27;s good to have a repertoire of attitudes that includes the role of a technician who puts on her gloves and jacket and goes down into the mess holding her breath.<p>Then there are two more things.<p>The first is the real possibility that your current place of employment is not a good fit. Maybe you would be more engaged at an early startup, or more inspired somewhere with a more diverse staff, or you might need different terms like Wednesdays off, half time telecommute, or whatever other arrangement. I don&#x27;t know and it might take experimentation. If your boss is sympathetic, hopefully you can work something out, or you can find another place.<p>The other thing is mental health broadly speaking. Lots of people in IT have &quot;issues&quot; and you can find dozens of courageous conference talks with personal stories of mental unwellness. Working people in general for obvious reasons can become dissatisfied with life, especially those whose job involve sitting still at the same desk every day—dealing with broken shit.<p>The state of affairs societally is obviously broken, and hopefully the next few years will have more recognition of this—talk of reduced hours and even basic income schemes are becoming normalized and viable. Still, political shifts notwithstanding, you need to take real measures in your life to combat the tendencies toward overwork, overdistraction, and the spiral of boredom.<p>It&#x27;s a spiral because it involves feedback loops that demand either strong effort or clever judo to escape. There are bootstrapping problems involved when your problem is that you don&#x27;t want to do stuff. Malignant problems exacerbate themselves: lack of interest leads to fear of dullness leads to nonactivity.<p>For all of this last point my primary advice is to talk to a professional in mental health. This is what they do. In some cases they might recommend a medicinal method of bootstrapping, if you&#x27;re okay with that and if you need it. But they also work with things like thought patterns and general counselling. Experienced therapists will have talked to hundreds of people with similar problems.<p>Secondarily, while I sympathize and recognize your situation, I&#x27;ll respectfully disagree that lack of hobbies makes a person dull. For an obvious contraindicator, this thread itself shows that you have questions to ask that people find relevant. Mental content isn&#x27;t everything. As a human you&#x27;re endowed with the capacities of consciousness that we all share and that&#x27;s the basis for curiosity, not some amount of learned facts or skills.<p>I mean, you don&#x27;t need anyone&#x27;s permission to start traveling, and all travelers start from this state of ignorance, yet their basic human receptiveness makes them capable of curiosity, and that makes them &quot;interesting&quot; as travelers.<p>If you&#x27;re not clinically depressed, if you can wake up in a hostel room and after a cup of coffee feel basically alright, you can go out in any foreign city and look around. You don&#x27;t need to be knowledgable about architecture or politics, but if you&#x27;re in Bangkok and see the king on billboards everywhere you&#x27;ll get curious and sooner or later you&#x27;ve learned about the history of Thai monarchism, maybe even read <i>The King Never Smiles</i>, and then when Southeast Asia comes up, you&#x27;re suddenly the guy with the interesting knowledge, and all you had to do was follow your natural curiosity.<p>I&#x27;ve saved this for last but consider meditation—in the very simple sense of sitting down quietly in the morning or evening, maybe with a cup of tea or something. It&#x27;s all dressed in flowery metaphysics and people get excited about it but it&#x27;s such a simple thing, to sit quietly. I don&#x27;t keep up with the science, but I don&#x27;t need statistical surveys to know that sitting quietly now and then is good for me. It&#x27;s obvious. It can feel excruciating when you&#x27;re mind is racing and you&#x27;re bored or full of self-loathing or whatever, but beneath all that thinking activity you&#x27;re strengthening a deeper capacity—and after 15 minutes, you have a new perspective, bad moods can dissipate, anxious thoughts dispersed, like Adam on the first morning (as Whitman wrote).<p>I&#x27;m way far into pretentious zone with meditation and Walt Whitman but whatever. Best wishes.