For the very moment you're in: I think it may be wise to accept things won't change today, or this week, but they will change soon, and for that to happen, you need to slowly start zooming out.

Your misery is quite a common part of life for many here, I would say.

It takes a huge amount of energy and dedication to become (and to stay) really good or successful at something, and to make it worse, there's so much competition (in technology now anyways) — it often seems everyone's two steps ahead. It can be absolutely daunting and feel like an impossible thing to pick up any motivation to keep up. I fully get it. Most of us have been at this very spot, many times before.

On paper, the solution is simple. The main reason you work for someone else is because you need money. You need that money, because it affords you things in life you otherwise won't have. See Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory.

Once you start to have more than the bare minimum of financial resources needed, you could start playing with things that interest you, or improve on the quality of things you already have. Most of us work our asses off to make as much money as possible, and that as fast as possible, so that we get to make the best use of it in our actual lives while we still can. That's the official reason, anyway.

The odd thing is, you need to know what you want in life. Without knowing, nothing will be worth even a minute of your work once you leave the "hygiene" territory.

If you just follow common patterns in life (get a job, be a good worker, try to get a raise, save for a house, start a family), you will eventually start questioning why you're doing all of this.

To know what you want in life, is probably impossible to fully figure out without knowing what you don't want. Exploring a bit of negative space to find the limits of what you're happy with, can be a start to find a solution eventually.

In tech, we have the insane luxury (at least for now) of being very easily employable. Your "hygiene" is sorted. This should allow you to explore quite a bit more than others.

My biggest struggle with "getting excited about new things" is that I almost always tend to interpolate into a wildly assumed future outcome where the idea or thing I am interested in turns out to be a waste of time. But it isn't.

I spent two years trying to write a book. Every day I worried about this being the stupidest thing I've attempted, every day I wanted to give up for that very reason. I kept pushing on with zero motivation, just out of self-hatred almost, wanting to see myself fail and knowing it all along — and, then, I eventually ended up meeting with the senior editors of the largest publishing house in the country. A potential deal was on the table, and two weeks later, it fell through. The project was terminated then and there, and I had nothing to show for two years of trying to be someone else in life. I did, however, learn so much about the industry (and writing in general), even so much so that I now feel incredibly happy that I fully tried and experienced it, but have this warm understanding with myself that this isn't something I'd like to do. I'm happier for it.

And, while I have to keep an eye on baseline income, I continue to explore things that I feel could be interesting. Sometimes, it's one evening and then I lose interest, other times, it can take years.

The only thing that makes this possible, is accepting that part of life is to explore and figure out what you like and don't like. If you take away "money or exposure" as success criteria (at the start), and your goal is to see how far you can get with it, then life should hopefully start to feel a lot easier to push through. I think it's important to understand that it's okay to have a hundred failed, unfinished projects, because many people keep looking for that one thing that pulls them out of it, that one thing that will finally change everything.

It rarely exists. I think it's a long string of random things, and while you can theorize in your mind about those forever, you could also just go and do whatever you like. Keep the base income flowing, and use your time to be someone else for a little while.