Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

Wait until you get older. I did! And I have identified over the years tons of applications that would help seniors that nobody gives one iota of attention to, because "no get rich quick money in it"

The simplest example of all. Shopping.I can't read price labels on the lowest shelf [0], and as for use-by date and ingredients, my OE nearsighted as hell lenses can't read any of them. Seniors who didn't have a career in engineering and computers get scammed regularly, get information from the internet that is either garbage or outright malicious, the list goes on and on. I am using my remaining time to address these.

And how about students? Everything changed overnight. Rather than enriching them, they are using AI to cheat and avoid thinking and learning. What would you say to them? What would you teach? How would your life and work experience benefit them?

Way back when, I planned some after school labs (there was money for such things) where kids would go out and collect data, and then deal with it collectively (talking to other kids and instructors, not "Professor Claude", who didn't exist in those days, and if their computers were inadequate, give them bootable linux media (like Knoppix) or just time remotely accessible.

Hey, I'm excited at 77.

These things didn't happen because I never had a network. Great things happen when there's a Jobs and a Woz. Not in isolation.

Needs change. Invent that REALLY REAL exoskeleton now, the robotic "fetch my meds" robotic assistant now, and they'll be ready when you're ready for them.

[0] Only Trader Joe's provides big, legible labels.

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

1. Take a break. I don't mean stop working, just fill your free time with other stuff, but if you don't code at work, it is a bonus. Try other things. I was in a position you describe, and I took a break, dived into studying psychology, you can choose anything you like, like keeping stray cat population in your neighborhood fed and sufficiently stroked behind their ears. Or can you play a harp? You can learn it, you know. (Speaking about psychology: your condition is a middle age crisis. Self-realization is done, all immediate goals are reached, you've got more freedom to choose next goals, and everything is increasingly becoming a routine. Nothing bad is happening, you just need to adapt. You will adapt, you don't need to do anything special, it will happen all by itself. Just exercise your new freedom a little, and in a couple of years new goals will find you.)

2. Stop thinking of important things. Had you read "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!"? If not, I suggest to read just for fun of it, but among all the jokes Feynman describes a period in his life when he felt like you. He couldn't find any good ideas what he could do in physics. At some point he took a seemingly silly problem, and solved it. And he came back to physics with it, later he discovered the differential equations from that silly problem in another "serious" problem and eventually got a Nobel Prize.

The moral is: you are overthinking it. You are looking for ideas for programs but you use too narrow filters. Like the problem should match your skills. Or the problem should be important enough to work on it.

So just take a break and look for some interesting problem. If you find any, you find some other way to entertain yourself, so not a big deal. Just stop obsessing about it and I'm sure it will come naturally.

I don't know when it stopped being fun, I don't recall hating Facebook in 2008, but I do know that it had pissed me off on more than one occasion by 2012.

I think community building is what's been missing or done badly for the last 15+ years. I can find a few subreddits where I like the community, but Discord and similar have never worked for me. I don't think that live chat suits my temperament. I also suspect that up and down votes have been corrosive for social media in general.

I don't know that you can get the feeling back without either building and maintaining your own communities using the tools the corporatized Internet makes available to you, or finding and participating in the communities that you like. I do know that five years ago when the fediverse was a topic of conversation that there was a thread that content moderation and curation was going to be the only valuable work to be done in social media.

tl;dr: I suspect it's a community building and maintenance problem, not a coding problem.