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Comment on Ask HN: Are you as passionate as you used to be?

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For me, I think it goes in waves. I went through periods where other things in my life were in disarray or where I had a lot of stresses from having kids and worrying about their future or just plain sleeping less while they were infants and toddlers or when the company I was working for was struggling financially.

Then there are upswings where the pure joy of learning something new or trying something challenging in computing comes right back with as much force as I could ever remember there being. (Doing Advent-of-Code in clojure this past Dec was one of those times of nearly pure joy for me.)

I do think it's easier in your first few years out of school because there's so much to learn and you're getting that feeling of progress and novelty every week, if not every day. After a while, you start to have more grind and less shiny-new, but there's still enough enjoyment that I get at not quite (but almost) twice your age.

If you "don't have a craving for anything anymore" that probably is a sign of general depression and you might need to talk to someone, might need to exercise, might need a vacation, or who knows what will help you climb out of it, but if you used to like programming and lots of other things and now you find you don't enjoy programming nor other things very much, I'd wager that it's not the programming part that's changed in that story.

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