good instinct. certainly the personal reward of getting something interesting running dims. and I find myself working considerably slower, and its quite a bit easier to get distracted.

most importantly the kind of work that was available for me 20 years ago was just inherently more interesting than the kind of work I can find today.

if you don't get 'retirement money' early on, I would highly recommend spinning up another vocation to spend your later years with. at the very least you're in a privileged position where, ageism and market conditions aside, you can always backfill with a little drudge work.

edit: I feel like I will have lost a lot of the fire when I'm that age.

Have to find new things to do and learn about to keep interest in your life and in your job. Eventually if you never been a manager then that might be an interesting job change. And then working on a different technology and then taking a different role yet again. All these things can keep your interest level up. Imagine if you just sat in a job and a desk and a giant cubicle farm and Shuffle papers and never did anything interesting but prepared TPS reports. We are a lot more fortunate as programmers in that we have a lot of different career opportunities.