Comment by brailsafe
6 days ago
I've been wondering this myself lately, there's a (very) subtle difference between this and burnout, whereby I'm sometimes productive, but I screw a lot of time away "trying" to do work when I'm not mentally engaged enough to actually do it. Burnout happens when I have no agency and am not productive enough for a long time, and then hit a wall where I literally can't imagine programming anymore. I also personally had a family member die and got laid off around 2016, and that definitely helped me burn out around that time. What's different since then is that while I'm now in a software career again, I've learned that it doesn't matter... at all, and I shouldn't try too hard to convince myself that it should. In 2016 I was of the mindset that if I was doing it for work, I should be doing it on my spare time too, and that's sufficient to cover my hobbies, but now I realize that's basically stupid and represents a lack of imagination and diversity that a healthy life should have. It turns out that not leaving the house and staring at a screen for a majority of ones time is fucking miserable no matter how much you're making doing it. Dramatic life events are good for learning that there's so much more that matters, and most products and most code basically don't. Should a CPA go home and maintain enthusiasm for filling out forms and engaging with bureaucracy, submitting taxes just for the hell of it?
So I do small bits of staring at screens in my spare time, but non-work time is so scare that I consider it too expensive to waste telling computers what to do, and this does help preserve some capacity to do it when it's necessary.
I don't know why this has been downvoted. It takes courage to put your struggles into words, and even if those struggles don't resonate with you is no reason to diminish them. Your experiences are just as valid as anyone elses. All the best in your journey!
Thanks! To be clear I'm not resentful and don't have negative feelings towards coding or programming, it's just that it's not worth sacrificing much more than anything else for. If I had a daughter with cancer, I would probably reduce my commitment to as close to zero as I mentally bear in order to spend time with her, and this just extends into other areas of life; JavaScript or whatever can wait, as interesting as it may be.
If I'm sitting down and not able to get into a zone, all other conditions being ideal, I've probably just been trying too hard and spending too much time on it, at the cost of other things that I subconsciously know I should probably be valuing more. This might be even more of a struggle if you have near complete agency of your time.
Like a relationship, you spend a ton of time together in the beginning, maybe even for quite a while, but if you trade your friends for them, or all your hobbies for scrolling Instagram, you'll be in for a wakeup call at some point when you can't remember how to show up for yourself.