I think two things happened: 1. I started to run out of things to learn about programming that weren't entirely academic or specialities I'd rarely have need f

I think two things happened: 1. I started to run out of things to learn about programming that weren't entirely academic or specialities I'd rarely have need for. So the get-up-and-go of being thrilled by learning something new faded. 2. I became less of a software consumer. In the 90's, it was exciting to see software doing a new thing that hadn't been done on computers before - graphics, sound, Internet, all the rest. I was enamored in that sense: what if I could work on something attention-getting like that? And yet my interest in coding had a sort of "but all the products suck, actually" undertone to it. It all crashed, was under-documented, had some goofy UX fail. I wanted to understand that and do better. And that conflict, of course, was fostered by realizing that I could do better, but I would have to pick one tiny slice of it to make better. And even doing that, I couldn't expect it to be used by anyone or to result in a career, because most of the professional code-slinging comes from a place defined by platform capitalism: the software is there to be in the way of the user so that it can extract a tax. Making it better isn't really the end goal, it's just a way to get users. And that holds true even if you look at open source and its various cults. Thus, like a lot of folks, I'd now like to have less of my computing experience be defined by software. Like furniture, it has to exist in my life, but I don't have to like it.