Listen, in life you just need to find "your thing." Your thing can be anything that you enjoy doing, or feel like you're good at. Everybody has a "thing", wheth

Listen, in life you just need to find "your thing." Your thing can be anything that you enjoy doing, or feel like you're good at. Everybody has a "thing", whether or not they know it. Sometimes I hear people say that they wish they were good at something, or had a hobby. Well, they are good at something, they just have to find it. So, find your thing and during your free time you really need to make an effort to do that thing on a regular basis. It can be running, fishing, programming, hanging out with family and friends - just something to take you away from work and stress. Working a job, 8 hours a day or more, can be difficult to unwind from. But neglecting to unwind will catch up with you eventually, and I always felt like it hit me in the form of depression or just a general negative attitude. If programming is your "thing" but yet you program at work, as well, like me, then this can be pretty difficult. If this is your scenario, I'd suggest switching it up completely, at home. Venture into some unknown language all together on a platform that you're not familiar with, even. Forget the JVM. If you stick to something that is close to what you do at your stressful job then I feel like your mind may never fully relax, even at home. I've been having a ton of fun learning how to program iphone applications over the past week. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time but always felt like the barrier to entry was high, because of the OSX requirement, the funky Objective-C language, the clunky Xcode IDE. But, newer versions of Xcode and the Objective-C compiler have become really awesome, actually. For me, iphone app dev is a slightly crazy but interesting combination of visual coding, because there's a lot of weird things like "shift click and drag a line from this GUI element over to this line of text in your code to create some very important delegate connection", combined with your typical programming but in a awkwardly funky language syntax - it's all pretty fun, really. Just some thoughts. Good luck!