It's normal. When you're young everything is pretty exciting to learn. You hit a make-or-break threshold with continued study at some point as it gets more difficult. And then as you go deeper into technical specialty the ROI diminishes, and you have to decide if that's what you're really studying now, or if you're just filling in a certain social/professional role, and if you're okay with that. A lot of people fall into crises as they end up realizing they don't want the role they've studied for, even getting all the way through medical school or passing the bar to practice law, only to quit there.
A lot of the misgiving and frustration with specific fields is really with the society and what it rewards: we live under nation-states, and within those, regardless of what the political system calls it specifically, what the state says deserves credit gets credit(funding, official titles, legal protections etc.) As a consequence a majority of big ambitions, artistic statements and such are just a matter of chasing after that, being "head of the class" and vocally believing whatever things are deemed Good For the Nation at the moment, and going on to build products and develop technologies that support and enable those beliefs(as your most wealthy and fanatical customers are likely to be true believers). Which will all change with the next crisis or election as the rules shift and a new set of beliefs rise up to the top spot. It can make a soul very cynical in short order, and it produces emptiness once you've reached a FAANG level of material satisfaction.
What we're ultimately building all the ambitions on are the "big three" of mathematics, science, philosophy. Studying those is generally virtuous, and you can definitely spend forever on them. But you can also "go wide" into the arts and sample bits and pieces of academic ideas as you need them. I've gotten really into cartooning and the whole idea of that is to go wide and simplify - take complex reference materials, copy them, understand them, break them down, put them back together in a more symbolic form. Communicate ideas that aren't clear, more clearly, finding new metaphors for them.
One of the rules I live by now is that on average, my day is better by seeking ordinary contentment instead of "big ups". Big ups lead in the direction of immaturity since they mostly involve paying for some kind of high-profile consumption and avoiding visibly hard work. But ordinary contentment is in just taking a small thing and fixing that, even if it's temporary or difficult in the moment. It can be the difference between "$50 storage container that adds a slight convenience for the next 30 years" and "$500 gadget that goes obsolete next year". And that carries over to stuff like programming in that most of the new stuff in programming is going to turn out to be a gadget, something used for a few moments of history and then discarded for the next big thing.
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It's normal. When you're young everything is pretty exciting to learn. You hit a make-or-break threshold with continued study at some point as it gets more difficult. And then as you go deeper into technical specialty the ROI diminishes, and you have to decide if that's what you're really studying now, or if you're just filling in a certain social/professional role, and if you're okay with that. A lot of people fall into crises as they end up realizing they don't want the role they've studied for, even getting all the way through medical school or passing the bar to practice law, only to quit there.
A lot of the misgiving and frustration with specific fields is really with the society and what it rewards: we live under nation-states, and within those, regardless of what the political system calls it specifically, what the state says deserves credit gets credit(funding, official titles, legal protections etc.) As a consequence a majority of big ambitions, artistic statements and such are just a matter of chasing after that, being "head of the class" and vocally believing whatever things are deemed Good For the Nation at the moment, and going on to build products and develop technologies that support and enable those beliefs(as your most wealthy and fanatical customers are likely to be true believers). Which will all change with the next crisis or election as the rules shift and a new set of beliefs rise up to the top spot. It can make a soul very cynical in short order, and it produces emptiness once you've reached a FAANG level of material satisfaction.
What we're ultimately building all the ambitions on are the "big three" of mathematics, science, philosophy. Studying those is generally virtuous, and you can definitely spend forever on them. But you can also "go wide" into the arts and sample bits and pieces of academic ideas as you need them. I've gotten really into cartooning and the whole idea of that is to go wide and simplify - take complex reference materials, copy them, understand them, break them down, put them back together in a more symbolic form. Communicate ideas that aren't clear, more clearly, finding new metaphors for them.
One of the rules I live by now is that on average, my day is better by seeking ordinary contentment instead of "big ups". Big ups lead in the direction of immaturity since they mostly involve paying for some kind of high-profile consumption and avoiding visibly hard work. But ordinary contentment is in just taking a small thing and fixing that, even if it's temporary or difficult in the moment. It can be the difference between "$50 storage container that adds a slight convenience for the next 30 years" and "$500 gadget that goes obsolete next year". And that carries over to stuff like programming in that most of the new stuff in programming is going to turn out to be a gadget, something used for a few moments of history and then discarded for the next big thing.