I read your comment last night and it bothered me enough that I had to google it to find it this morning. tl;dr: Look for things that spark joy and double down

I read your comment last night and it bothered me enough that I had to google it to find it this morning. tl;dr: Look for things that spark joy and double down on them. Forget about success, focus on fun in the moment. I beleive you have an unmet need which is causing you suffering, it just may not be what you seem to think it is. I also started feeling the same way lately. I work with a bunch of PhDs. To me it seems like they are constantly running marathons, writing papers, giving talks etc. Me I'm just a programmer working amongst them, hopefully helping them write better code. Added to that, I also felt just meh about the work I do, another server deployment, another backend service to deploy etc... Objectively I know it helps the scientists I work with, but it just doesn't feel that way. Honestly I thought I didn't like programming anymore till I happened upon something that sparked the same joy I used to feel when I was 13 hacking on my Apple ][. It happened to be the Rust programming language (I had been mostly doing Java server side work recently). I would say that the fact that you are even feeling like this, that you are even asking these questions suggests that you have a divergent mind. Don't stop looking, except don't use 'success' as your criteria, look for the things that give you joy, and when you find one just keep coming back to it. Note that the joy may not leap out at you right away. It can be that we have gotten out of the habit of recognising fun when we see it, so you might have to make yourself quiet enough to hear it. Edit: To add a final point. For me I figured that one of my unmet needs was to have my own thing that I could master completely. My side project in Rust became that for me. In that project I was not forced into any compromise, and I understand each and every line in there. Rust actually made this easier for me, because I found that their documentation is aimed at allowing you to reach full understanding¹, which after years of trial and error server side programming with frameworks felt just simply awesome to me. 1: http://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/share/doc/rust/html/book/first-edition/the-stack-and-the-heap.html http://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/sha...