Comment by ordu

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

1. Take a break. I don't mean stop working, just fill your free time with other stuff, but if you don't code at work, it is a bonus. Try other things. I was in a position you describe, and I took a break, dived into studying psychology, you can choose anything you like, like keeping stray cat population in your neighborhood fed and sufficiently stroked behind their ears. Or can you play a harp? You can learn it, you know. (Speaking about psychology: your condition is a middle age crisis. Self-realization is done, all immediate goals are reached, you've got more freedom to choose next goals, and everything is increasingly becoming a routine. Nothing bad is happening, you just need to adapt. You will adapt, you don't need to do anything special, it will happen all by itself. Just exercise your new freedom a little, and in a couple of years new goals will find you.)

2. Stop thinking of important things. Had you read "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!"? If not, I suggest to read just for fun of it, but among all the jokes Feynman describes a period in his life when he felt like you. He couldn't find any good ideas what he could do in physics. At some point he took a seemingly silly problem, and solved it. And he came back to physics with it, later he discovered the differential equations from that silly problem in another "serious" problem and eventually got a Nobel Prize.

The moral is: you are overthinking it. You are looking for ideas for programs but you use too narrow filters. Like the problem should match your skills. Or the problem should be important enough to work on it.

So just take a break and look for some interesting problem. If you find any, you find some other way to entertain yourself, so not a big deal. Just stop obsessing about it and I'm sure it will come naturally.