Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?

Not the one you asked, but I want to offer two things:

How good it is depends on a person and their ability to understand help as opposed to owning other peoples problems. It can be easy to get sucked into all that and make things worse.

Assuming all that is reasonable, I find helping others energizing. And it exercises skills that may be getting dull or increasingly hard to relate to.

FWIW

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. It sucks, I don't wish it on anyone. Highly recommend taking some significant time off. Like, off, off, not "I'm behind at work and behind on my hobby projects and behind on home maintenance and behind on my personal exercise goals, gonna take 24 personal hours Mon-Weds next week, I should be able to renovate my guest bath in that time, it's needed work for 3 years".

During that time, stop trying to be productive because you feel like you ought to. Wait until you feel like you want to. Read, take a walk, do some cooking, hang out with friends or family.

Gauge for yourself whether media consumption, especially during that time, is helping you relax or whether it's substituting both the motivation and reward for actually doing the thing you don't have the energy to do yourself. That was a big problem for me: We train our brains to reward us for accomplishing a cool thing with a boost of dopamine. Later, it optimizes the process to reward you earlier for just planning to do the thing - sketching, architecting, dreaming, writing task lists. Eventually, it gives you the same "I'm really proud of that accomplishment" reward for just watching someone on Youtube do it (you don't even have to look at all the off-camera drudge work).

Also, given the time of year, depending on your latitude, check for seasonal affective disorder as a potential antagonist of depression. Talk to a counselor, get some bright lights, bundle up and get outside if the sun is out, take some vitamin D supplements.

I’d say you’re maybe coming to your senses. Everything takes so much effort, computers and software are so tedious. Docs are shitty, googling error messages to figure out what’s wrong. Stuff all of it.

I’ve had a long and, I suppose, successful career putting up with that shit. These days I’d rather do anything physical.

Meta, but what strikes me about these type of Ask HN's is : in 99% of the cases, the author does not participate in the discussion ( or answers raised questions ).

When you first start off programming (or any other skill based activity), you don't know what you don't know. That is, when starting a project you don't realize at the beginning how much effort goes into every subsection to bring the project to completion.

Then, once you get a few projects done, you start building up skill. So what was hard then starts becoming easier -- which opens up the door to new things that are hard now, but were impossible earlier. However you are able to still approach each project, because past experience taught you that you are getting better at the craft with each project. Which has a motivating factor (similar how watching your fitness stats is motivation to keep going to the gym, or being to play more complicated pieces on an instrument is motivation to keep practicing).

So what happens with programming, or fitness activities, or playing an instrument, is that after a period of time your skills start to level off. You don't get measurable more skill each time you practice, so that removes one of the motivation factors. And you "know" that you will make some mistakes that you keep making (hitting the wrong note on a piano, going down a wrong design path requiring scrapping a big chunk of code that you've worked on for several days, etc). That anticipation of failure is a de-motivation factor. And on top of that, even if you know you won't make much of a mistake, since you are doing "the same thing" you've done hundreds of times (ran the same mile, played the same song, wrote the same boilerplate), it gets extremely boring.

So the trick is to find acceptance that this may be the natural course of how things work. The human brain craves novelty, but you can also find comfort in familiarity also. Just treat programming like you would other things in life, that is a means to an end, and not the end itself. Think of other chores you do daily, such as the daily drive into the office, cooking dinner, showering / personal grooming (how many kids hate remembering to brush their teeth, and how eventually it just becomes a part of your daily habit).