I started seeing a therapist about a year ago and went through a similar mental switch. I used to think of them as, like "mind doctors" to fix you when something is going wrong. But now I realize therapists are much more like personal trainers for your mind.
I'm not mentally ill or suffering any particular crisis and I still get a ton of my therapy appointments. It's basically an hour with a really smart person deeply trained in psychology who helps me make the most out of my particular brain and personality.
I love F#. F# is by far my favorite programming language when it comes to writing enterprise software.
The problem with the F# job was that many on the sales team, and in upper management overall, were just bad people. They were a bad influence on my boss, the CTO and an otherwise good person. I ended up resigning over an ethics dispute.
I mean, there are plenty of things I used to like that I don't anymore, should I go see a therapist every time my interests change?
In this case though, I see someone who badly wants to be enjoying programming, but for whatever reason they don't understand they don't. It's probably a good time to talk to someone. Usually I'd start with my girlfriend, maybe my mum, perhaps take a few weeks off and then see how I feel. If that doesn't sort it, I'd probably want to talk to a therapist.
I would recommend reading munificent's comment above about therapists as "mental trainers." I think everyone should consider seeing a therapist at least at some point in their lives. The idea that therapy is only when something is medically wrong is at best misguided and at worst dangerous.
When I suggested OP considers therapy, I didn't mean "uh oh, sounds like you're clinically depressed, DSM-V states that a loss of interest..." And the word "consider" is doing a lot of work there. OP's brain is clearly trying to tell them something, and having a knowledgeable certified professional to talk things through with is simply prudent when it comes to something as profound (and risky) as reconsidering your career.
Changing hobbies is not the same as trying to change what you did for a living for the past decade.
I've met an artist who became a doctor, a lawyer who became a stockbroker, a software developer who became a full-time professional musician, a professor who started a hedge fund, etc.
A simplistic metric like "job listings on angel.co" (especially if you're specifically looking for Rails in the job posting title) don't tell the whole story.
Use the right tool for the job. If "the winner" was all that mattered, we'd all be using Java now, and it would remain the top language forever, as long as it makes any sense at all to use -- not even requiring it to make more sense than other options.
It is less of a problem for mature ecosystem and tools, but being in the "not winner" position will likely induce negative effects in the long term technological progress. (I am sure there are many counterexamples)
Sufficient investment for significant ongoing value is a matter of a threshold relevant to the particular needs served by the target technology, not of rank. As long as there's "enough" interest, it will have as much likelihood of stable or increasing value for (appropriately targeted) users as anything else.
Meanwhile, too much investment from too-big interested parties can ruin something pretty thoroughly.
Things are not as straightforwardly popularity-contest-driven as you seem to suggest.
Popularity contests are not simple.
Programming is an huge field comprising many unsyncronized industries and fields. Each of them can have its own winner (or winners) and they interact in complex ways. How is beyond the point.
My claim is that having the most mindshare/resources is the simplest way to keep having the most mindshare/resources. Few technologies rely only o this to stay alive, but a relevant factor is that differently than many other (often technical) advantages this one has a positive feedback loop.
Coming back to the original topic, this might mean that even if you invest a lot in the "best" tool to solve your problems it is possible that the lack of ecosystem around it (due to other people choosing "worse" tools for the same problems) makes it a losing investment.
Of course things are not linear and even the best interpolations have only intervals of validity, yet general long-term trends and cycles exist.
If you want you can add a rate of decay to the weight of nodes in the model, but the point remain: resource distribution is typically not fair in any a priori sense; often it simply scale with the already available resources.
Example: Bitcoin is the among biggest cryptocoins mostly because it was the biggest at some point.
I did not, in fact, say they were.
> My claim is that having the most mindshare/resources is the simplest way to keep having the most mindshare/resources.
That's largely true. Of course, having "enough" mindshare/resources is plenty, generally; one needn't necessarily have "the most". I don't see Ruby or Rails going away any time soon, even if your local area's angel.co listings show a 40% higher rate of job postings that explicitly mention Django in the headline. Development is still quite active both on, and with, the language and the framework.
> Coming back to the original topic, this might mean that even if you invest a lot in the "best" tool to solve your problems it is possible that the lack of ecosystem around it (due to other people choosing "worse" tools for the same problems) makes it a losing investment.
If your choice is Smalltalk, that might be true. If it's actually a very active community around a language and framework that provide extremely good productivity support and a lot of advanced tooling constantly attracting more innovation and heavily used in some sectors, like Ruby and Rails, it's not so true. There's pretty much guaranteed (absent government-granted monopolies) to be quite a bit of diversity in "popular enough" languages and tools for any high-traffic development sector, and "startups" definitely qualifies as such a sector of development as a field of professional work. The "winner" approach you seem to want to champion would have room for basically two options, and both of them have "Java" in the names of their most popular implementations, so arguing about the relative popularity of a Python framework in one corner of the world is irrelevant at best given your evidently intended thesis.
> Example: Bitcoin is the among biggest cryptocoins mostly because it was the biggest at some point.
This is a good point, but does not address the fact that this doesn't mean discounting Decred or Monero as a terrible choice for any useful timescale is the obvious best option.
Ruby on Rails is more popular in some areas than Django. Ruby on Rails gets a lot of time and money investment. Ruby on Rails is likely to be a good, stable choice for years to come. That example illustrates the fact that always choosing "the winner" doesn't make sense if "the winner" involves choosing the second-worst tool for your specific job out of a field of a dozen or more available tools.
This may sound dismissive or condescending and I promise it isn't my intent: have you considered speaking with an actual therapist? As a society we tend to think of therapists as something you do when you're mentally ill, but you don't just go to the dentist when you suspect you have a cavity: mental hygiene is important, and humans are universally bad at self-diagnosis, either physiological or otherwise.
In my current job I write Python, which I really don't like very much and I get burned out on Python-specific things. But I know my feelings of burnout are due to things that would be true regardless of the technical environment - and that an overall job with Python is far preferable to my previously miserable job with F#. And there's a lot of non-job stuff going on - such as the historic pandemic, and domestic stresses from being cooped up at home.
So speaking with a therapist about what's actually eating you might be quite worthwhile. If it is just burnout with programming, there really are specialists out there who might give well-informed, non-anecdotal advice. If it's something else, then having a professional suss it out means you can make better decisions about major aspects of your life. Plus, therapy is something that's easy to do over videochat. I am not recommending therapy, but I do think you should consider it.