I lost interest in my career several years ago, but now I think I’m just losing interest in programming in general. I sat down the other night to get started in a grand project I’ve been getting so excited about and I just couldn’t and this seems to be pretty common lately. The projects I dream up are super cool feats of hacker ability, but then much of what’s involved in doing it just feels tedious and I know I’m going to be stuck screwing around with the most trivial boilerplate crap. Most of the time these days, my projects always get delayed for one reason or another. Normally it gets expensive or it requires me to be good at something I’m just not, or I just get stuck on something where I have no idea where to look for answer because it’s so indescribably niche. Of course, as in the example I stated earlier, I look at the boilerplate involved look at the code required to do what I want I my brain just shuts off and my eyes glaze over. I’ve never been particularly good at anything, but at least I was somewhat driven in the past. Now, I can’t even get to work on the projects that do interest me. I lose motivation too easily (i.e. if I see someone working on something cooler). Most of the times my projects end up “delayed indefinitely”
This isn’t a case of getting out of my comfort zone and trying other subfields either. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for 2 or 3 years, but nothing really interests me and the things that do... well, refer to the previous paragraph. The most recent project is very wide and covers many things, but I constantly lose and gain interest on it before even starting any work.
Sure I have things outside programming that interest me, but nothing conductive to hands on, hobbyist work, do at best, I’m stuck passively consuming content related to those.
So I’m not sure what to do now. How can I get the spark I used to have back,