Don’t beat yourself up, there’s this weird belief in the programming world that to be good you have to have a deep passion for it, and want to spend every wakin

Don’t beat yourself up, there’s this weird belief in the programming world that to be good you have to have a deep passion for it, and want to spend every waking moment writing software and loving it. I can’t think of many careers that have that sort of pathology. You don’t hear about accountants doing books to unwind after a hard day at work, or removal men loading boxes into a truck as a hobby. I think a lot of it comes from the fact a large proportion of us kind of fell into programming as a career, so we have memories of when it was just a hobby, and we spent endless hours learning new tricks and developing skills. Keep in mind, you’re probably still doing that. You’re doing it 8+ hours a day, five days a week. Of course you don’t feel like doing some more of it when you get home. For my part, I’ve kind of accepted that I’m not going to be itching to write code for fun all the time. Every now and then something will tickle my fancy, and I’ll go down a rabbit hole learning about it for a bit, then I’ll drop it once I feel I’ve got what I want from it. Outside of those times I just do other things. I watch TV, I play computer games, I pick up hobbies which I’ll be obsessed with for a month or so, and then horde the things acquired for that hobby and let them gather dust for a year before I pick it back up again. TLDR; your work is unlikely to be your hobby most of the time, and passive consumption is fine, especially when you professionally create things.