> "I sat down the other night to get started in a grand project I’ve been getting so excited about and I just couldn’t and this seems to be pretty common lately

> "I sat down the other night to get started in a grand project I’ve been getting so excited about and I just couldn’t and this seems to be pretty common lately. The projects I dream up are super cool feats of hacker ability" "I keep dreaming up these high status projects and imagining all the people who will respect me and all the money I'll make, nothing to do with code or fun or problem solving. They need skills I don't have and work I don't want to do. Then I beat myself up about my inability to reach these goals, then quit, what do?" Realise that what you're dreaming of isn't /programming/ it's /being a superhero/. "I keep imagining distressed women screaming for my attention and then I fly in and lift the falling skyscraper off their cat, and they marry me, but then I go to the gym and can't even lift 1Kg because the distance between my expectations and reality is making it very clear that my expectations are a fantasy, and I just don't want to face that". Happened to Physicist Richard Feynman, incidentally, all the high expectations of him to produce great things. He ended up saying screw everyone and their expectations, he was only going to work on fun things, and started thinking about wobbling plates of custard in the cafeteria instead. Answer: Same answer every spiritual mystic has said for generations - kill your ego, lose your self esteem, die into being nobody, let the world go hang itself on its high status, and please yourself with some work and problems you enjoy working on[1], not work and problems you think you should enjoy working on. Let the boilerplate come from your fingers at work, because it earns you food, and don't stress over it. [1] that is specifically and worth calling out, things that when you do it, you feel good. And NOT things that you habitually do to try and feel good, but which don't feel good, and NOT things in the category called feel-good things. Specifically, things that when you are doing them, raise good feelings within you. e.g. don't watch a sci-fi film because you always used to enjoy watching sci-fi and feel that you ought to enjoy it again, if you aren't enjoying it. Don't watch a feel-good romantic comedy that you hate because society calls it "feel good". Do ... thing that catches your attention a little but feels stupid or embarassing or a waste of time so you'd normally dismiss it, but actually feels mildly nice.