For me, I needed to treat programming at work and programming at home as two different mental "things" that have zero correlaton. Programming is a skill like reading - you can do it at work and you can do it at home. Do people get burnt out from reading emails or whatever at work so much that they don't get enjoyment out of reading books or whatever in their own time? Perhaps, but it feels to me that reading is too much of a "core" or "fundamental" skill that you cannot allow your job to come to "dominate" or "own" that - it is a universal part of your life and education that it needs to exist separately from your day job - programming is the same.

Also I feel that there is a lot of pressure within communities like HN that implicitly (... or outright explicitly) makes you feel like you should always have a side project on the go, or you should be working on some amazing start-up idea, or you should be contributing to open source etc. All of that is basically a second job I'd say - you need to apply the same mental energy and rigor doing that sort of thing as you would in your job. I feel like this is an unhealthy mindset and unfair expectation.

I don't know about you but when I was a kid just starting out in programming I just messed about doing whatever I fancied without any expectations of "releasing" anything or turning a profit etc - I just scratched my own itch and left a chain of unfinished ideas and projects behind me as my mind wandered and I had zero mental attachment to any particular idea or objective. I was free to follow my own path without feeling that I needed to give an idea justice and see it through to some kind of release or public distribution etc.

I now personally try to do the same now too - I try to avoid letting any ideas about "releasing"/sharing/distributing any of my spare-time work from creeping into my mind. If I go into something knowing that I might close the IDE the same evening and never ever open the file again, or I can write hideous hacky messes because why the hell not, or I can just forgo any kind of tests or repeatable builds etc etc then that is freeing and removes a lot of the mental baggage of doing a "good job" and let's you concentrate on satisfying your own needs.

Oh and also unlike other people on here, I personally recommend JavaScript as a great language to use for personal messing about - flexible, universal, performant, and most importantly it has absolutely zero barrier to entry - you can litterly just open your browser's dev console right now and you are up and running, or just create a .HTML file and you are up and running that way too without any joy-/motivation-sapping bullshit or ceremony related to setting up build files/python anaconda bollocks/environment variables/installing compilers or other nonsense - it just works right now with what you already have on any computer you sit at (... or you can go deeper and install typescript compilers or node+npm etc if you want to) Ignore comments about churn or change-fatigue regarding JavaScript - the language itself is separate from the libraries people use and you can go a long way with the core language and modern standards-based APIs without ever touching an external library.

Good luck!