Hey, angry - I'm not quite where you are (I haven't broken free and gone completely independent yet), but I sympathize with the feeling. I also tend to be very

Hey, angry - I'm not quite where you are (I haven't broken free and gone completely independent yet), but I sympathize with the feeling. I also tend to be very critical and don't very much like to solve problems I don't perceive as problems (e.g. writing yet another CRUD app). My best guess, and this is honestly just a guess, is that this is a similar situation to a rut. The best way I've found to get out of a rut is to start saying "yes" to things I normally wouldn't do. That introduces a level of "randomness" to an otherwise stable system and can break me out of what I perceive as a local maximum. Try coding something that you believe you understand but whose implementation will take some figuring out. For example, a couple of years I wrote a genetic algorithm that evolved an arithmetic expression to approximate a square root in C++. After a hell of a lot of wrangling, I got it to work but thought to myself that I spent more time fighting C++ than I did fighting the problem itself. That prompted me to start working with Lisp because Lisp is better suited for that problem than C++ was. I never had an itch to work in Lisp before, and that certainly wasn't my goal, but I think that the experiment was fruitful because it led to a challenge I genuinely want to meet. You never know when you'll run into an interesting implementation wrinkle in an otherwise "solved" problem, and that can provide plenty of itches you might never have seen at a first glance. tl; dr - If you don't have an itch, and haven't found someone else with an itch you'd like, then you need exposure to more itches.