Ask HN: How to get my development passion/productivity back?

I would not recommend asking people on HN to diagnose you. It is not that people on here don't have good advice and experience - they do. But everyone only knows their own life. People with depression will tell you it is 100% depression, while people with anxiety will tell you it is 100% anxiety, and people with burnout will tell you it is 100% burnout. Other people will tell you to go outside, or to eat low carb, or to lift weights. Basically, you'll get a pile of anecdotal advice from people who are not living your life, and don't know all the possibilities of what could be wrong, including that there could be an underlying medical problem.

The more important factor is that you know something is wrong and you want to fix it. Your best bet is to talk to a doctor and/or therapist about it. Get a professional diagnosis of what is actually wrong (or a confirmation that nothing is wrong and this is normal), and then filter out anecdotal advice that isn't applicable to that diagnosis.

Aside from any diagnoses or assessing burnout, I’d suggest thinking about what is actually causing the lack of motivation when you sit down. Working on a business is different from coding, per se. You might lack motivation to work on your business specifically or to generally be figuring out business problems. All coding is not equal — are you coding bug fixes, new features, solutions architecture? These all kind of have different underlying requirements and you might find that some motivate you more than others. For me, bug fixes are necessary but draining. The days where I spend 8 hours putting out those fires absolutely suck. Doing the “create a puzzle and build the solution” stuff is way more exciting, fulfilling, and motivating for me.

Your business revenue can really help you out in this department. If it happens to be that you lack motivation for specific things, can you hire those out and focus on working on the things that actually give you joy and satisfaction?

The suggestion of therapy is a good one, but I think that figuring out the root causes of your lack of motivation is also a good first step. So when you sit down to work and can’t get going, ask yourself “what am I trying to do, why am I doing it, why don’t I want to, and would handing this off to somebody else give me motivation to move onto the next thing.”

Maybe the answer is to sell the business and find something else that’s exciting to work on, or just to give your mind the space to recover.

Best of luck!

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.

Are you trying to do it all solo?

It's very hard to grind for many years on your own. If you want to grow your business, and you're already feeling a lack of motivation, that seems destined to fail if you try it alone.

Whatever path you choose, I highly recommend trying to bring someone alongside. HN is good for finding folks to work with.

I'm in a similar mindset although can't get my side project(s) going. Since 2019, my son was born, my brother died, and my mother is getting to the point where she won't be able to care for herself. We moved out of the Bayarea to my chagrin, to be closer to my wife's ageing parents in Portland. Didn't had any before, but having moved and new, it's even harder to make social connections no tech here. I feel you, and I believe you and are in the same place mentally; lacking passion, motivation, sense of belonging, purpose. I suspect maybe midlife sort of crisis? If you wanna have a convo. Ping me Lakota gmail.

Given all the negative events in your life, seems like it could be depression/burnout.

IMO, seek professional help, even if that takes a few iterations to find the right fit.

Could say more, but that shouldn't be a public conversation. Reach out if you'd like, I'm easy to find online.

This is depression. I wrestle with it too and it feels just like this. It led me to seek career change and put my livelihood at risk at one point with no noticable effect on my motivation. I've been seeing a therapist and it has been helpful to have more awareness of the underlying feels that lock me up. I hope this validation helps you to work this out. It's not like flipping a switch, but it helps to be able to see there's a way through.

In an ideal world we'd be able to switch careers and do different things over the course of our lives, but money reigns supreme.

I think what you're experiencing is normal. An entire lifetime doing the same thing for almost all of your time is going to get tedious eventually. I'm about there myself, I realize I'm in the best possible world but my passion has fizzled out.

First, read this about focus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43715347

Now, it’s only a matter of what you want. When I went through burn out after being laid off the first thing I did was define what I wanted:

* Never again write JavaScript for work.

* Watch TV

* Play games

That became my life goals, basic burn out leisure stuff. What’s important is not the absurdity of the goals, but just knowing what you really want.

When I was at peak burn out I really did not want to write software, but I was really good at writing personal applications. If I really wanted to watch more TV and play more games then I would need a place to store these things free from subscriptions, advertising, analytics, and all that shit we hate. So, I created a home media server with custom media software to make it play from playlists in my IPhone.

After changing careers I realized I could do the enterprise API management way better than the enterprise, so I wrote a dashboard of web servers and docker container management that included a better way to proxy traffic for the home file server.

If the goal is still to maximize time for watching TV and playing games then I need to automate this shit out of the new career. This means adapting this personal dashboard tool to doing job related things. Now I can test and analyze traffic better than the other available tools at work. I still need to write agents for the dashboard tool to run a list of transmission tasks with assertions to close that loop though. Now I have more time for my life goals even at work. My productivity at work appears high.

Seems like a lot is going on in your life. This might just be your body telling you to take a break. Maybe just take it easy for a while, and be okay with decreased productivity. Don't beat yourself up over it. We are not machines that output 100% all the time. Decrease your expectations. Sounds like you're already doing enough.

You don't mention your age or how long you have been a developer before 2016. Burnout after 5 years is different than burnout after 25 years.

First things first, it's ok to feel this. Never invalidate your feelings. You clearly have been through a lot and it will affect your daily tasks. Coding is hard, no matter how small or big the project, and it requires a certain type of brain power and capability.

Start by counting your wins. You have somehow made it through hardships and still managed to create something successful - that's one. (a big one)

take it day by day. But know you're not alone. Don't forget to take time for yourself :)

bro you feel depressed and you have built a successful business that pays x2 your salary, I'm wondering what successful business could you build if you were motivated.

I'm not a depressed person and I never had success with building a side project that actually makes money.

I came to conclusion in the last months that it's not about loving to do a thing to become successful in it, it's just doing!

I would not recommend asking people on HN about this. You should seek out a competent mental health professional. These are serious issues, and you deserve competent help.

There are just as many people who give good advice as those that mislead you towards bad advice deceptively on HN. The latter group may actually hold dominance given what I've seen of the structural biases inherent in who gets heard overall.

Useful advice is often removed or downvoted to the point where you don't see it. This is true of all social media today post-AI.

I fully expect this post to be downvoted solely for pointing this fact out, in saying this.

You have a lot of life changes happening all at once. Your support structure is unstable as a result, and this puts extra work on you in cognitive load.

You don't mention how much time you spend on your business, family, etc, but I'd guess its more than half your time for the former most.

Did you take time off for bereavement? (mother, sister, child soon?) Have you done a bucket list?

Failing to take time needed for changes represses issues, and similar to burnout eventually you crack and succumb to the guilt and stress. Are you sure you aren't just burying your head in work trying to ignore reality?

You can only fix this by bringing the issues to the front of your attention and working through the issues, addressing them in turn. There won't be a magic bullet.

Right now, given what you've said it seems like you are trying to hide in your work. It will only get worse the longer you do this.

Repression has a complex relationship with psychosis, and that's important because eventually if you do nothing people crack.

I would suggest you bring someone on to help running the day-to-day of the business so you can take the appropriate time for these issues. Your business must be a bus factor greater than 1 so you don't have to worry about finances during these tough times.

Your lack of focus is most likely your unconscious mind telling you that you are running away from working on important issues you don't want to deal with.

You may not be able to control the circumstances, but you can control what you do about it.

The focus will return once you've worked through the personal issues. If you are unable or unaware of how to go about working on these things, you should seek competent professional help.

Be mindful though, there are many mental health professionals who are not great at their job or that competent. These people may run you in a circle.

If they aren't helping you within a few sessions and you are putting in the work, move on to a new one.

Your priorities are in the wrong place. I understand your need to work on your full time business because we all have an addiction to food and shelter. But instead of having a goal to spend more time with family and friends, you want to spend more time on computer based problems?

When you were going through your family issues, were you thinking that you should be spending more quality time with your family or your side projects?

The culture of “I always need to be spending time on my computer and doing side projects after work” is one of the most toxic things about our industry.

Work on your main business for reasonable amount of time, shut your computer down and live your life, enjoy your family and friends - “touch grass”

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