It's not always a lack of passion for the subject. I have plenty of that, and I still hack on things more often than I am idle. I'm always trying to create vs

It's not always a lack of passion for the subject. I have plenty of that, and I still hack on things more often than I am idle. I'm always trying to create vs. consume. However I definitely get not wanting to learn the next thing - especially after hours. Most of what I've watched happen over the last 10 years is just yet another shiny tool to replace the old tool, without any real-world benefit towards actually Getting Shit Done(tm). Essentially I've watched a lot of technologies get replaced by tech that is only marginally better (if at all) that has one significant feature: It's not the old 'boring' technology. From what I can tell programming languages have become less about getting things done, and more about social signaling you are part of an "in" group. For technologies that are truly groundbreaking and game changing? I can't tear myself away. For the shiny language of the week? Meh. For Yet Another Web Framework? Yawn. I simply am tired of learning those technologies - learning one or two should be enough, and then you get to work and solve real issues. Learning the syntax differences between Perl, Python, and Ruby is truly a waste of time that is extremely boring in nature - you're generally not learning many new concepts, just different ways of implementing the same stuff you've been doing for 20 years. You don't need to understand how to operate 14 different hammer models - you pick the regular hammer you usually use, and maybe a speciality one or two for occasional jobs where they make sense. Programmers seem to pick the hammer based on how cool it looks and if their friends think more of the project because it's made with the same hammer they also chose. I think the amount of time technologists put into re-inventing the wheel is absurd, and has really caused me to largely burn out in the industry and start planning something for "post tech" where it's less learning treadmill for few real world business gains. Put another way - What gets me up in the morning is solving problems for people in an efficient manner and moving on to the next problem. Many seem to think technology exists to build other technology, and that problem set simply isn't interesting to me. Thankfully I'm not a programmer - I only have to dabble to show proof of concepts. If I were, I know I would no longer be for largely this fact alone. Learning and using the next new shiny is simply getting boring as hell and uninteresting. It's almost as if the industry has run out of real work to do some days.