> You are half-way through a change. Your old motivations have lost their appeal.
I think I'm in the same boat as the OP, and this comment resonated with me. When I started programming nearly a decade ago, I had an abundance of intrinsic motivation. I was so excited to learn about software, how to build websites, phone applications, server applications etc. That drive was a genuine passion and love for computers and software and it carried me nearly a decade in this industry through some amazing challenges. I've grown more than I could have imagined.
Yet now in my mid 30s... that passion has really dwindled. When I wake up on a Saturday, I'm not rushing to get to my computer to code. I'm more interested in relaxing, getting outside, or just doing something else. Yet in the back of my mind is a constant pressure, a constant reminder, that I should be productive.
There's always more to learn, and didn't I struggle to write that regex the other day? Didn't I want to finally dig deep into Tensor Flow? Wasn't I going to bust out the breadboard and get into some hardware design?
Why don't I feel like doing any of that now? Why is the only motivation, money?
Like the OP, the only thing that seems like it could light a fire under my ass would be some big monetary opportunity. I could get excited to build a new app, or a new server project, or website, if I knew I stood a good chance of really changing my life for the better.
I think that as the novelty of programming wore off, the only thing left was money. Initially I was motivated by wanting to understand everything. I truly didn't know how to make a phone application, and now I've made many. I didn't understand how to build and deploy a website, and now I've done that many times.
What's left? Where do I go from here? I really have more questions than answers. With another 25-30 years of "work" to do, I'm really confused about what I will do.
"Boudin was born in New York City to Jewish parents. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members, both convicted of murder."[1]
I'm really confused as to what point you're trying to make with this comment.
In order to secure religious freedoms, religious rights, and LGBTQ inclusion, we need to have a filthy city, filled with homelessness, drug addiction, and absurd policies?
> I just keep everything in memory in native data structures and flush to disk periodically;
Can you expand on what you mean by this? I am interpreting that to mean that you are actually writing to a file and reading from a file rather than using SQL?
The scary thing is how much ones phone number (a somewhat ephemeral thing) is actually bound to your IDENTITY.
Considering your phone number is more and more being used in 2FA ... if you were to ever change your number and someone else got it, this would pose a serious security risk if you failed to change over ALL of your internet accounts 2FA to the new number.
This is true in most languages really. It starts with people just wanting to speed up their development by turning common tasks into some macro, or annotation, or even library. But where does it end? It ends in a convoluted mess of dependencies, weird syntax, and hopeless stack traces.
So much work can be done with plain old Java. Or plain old JavaScript. Or plain old C + stdlib.
I just find it amusing that the very source of the problem (humans) are themselves positing that they are also part of the solution.
Why kid ourselves? 8+ billion humans are going to consume, and keep consuming, endlessly. The ONLY actual solution that involves humans is expansion. We either expand to another planet / galaxy, or we ride this one out to its (and our) death.
That's why we should prioritize science more as a collective. We need more Elon Musks with giant aspirations to really move the needle.
How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.
Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.
Wow. I would love to hear more about this. A lot of people on here suffer from burnout in some form or another, and I would imagine very view actually cut the cord. Do you have a writeup anywhere about your experience?
Alright, so now I'm left wondering: What about big agriculture?
There's a popular YouTube channel [1] with advocates for a plant based diet, low in fat, yet suspiciously says almost nothing about hydrogenated vegetable oils (canola, soy bean, sunflower, etc).
These oils - according to many studies - are THE leading source of heart disease, right up there with sugar. They're a highly unnatural food, heavily processed, never before in nature were you able to consume the oil extracted from a f*cking sunflower like you can today.
And yet? NutritionFacts.org almost never, and I mean 99.9% of the time never mentions how bad these oils are for you.
Coincidence? I mean really, what CAN you believe these days? There's a study for this, and a study for that. Everything is bad for you.