This is a bit of an adage but can you make your hobbies your projects for some amount of time? For example, I spent a while at a start up recently and I really started to find programming boring for the first time in my life. I started setting a side more time to work on it as a hobby and my own projects instead of watching twitch or TV. I eventually started feeling more enthusiasm for work programming projects. I feel like you get bored of everything eventually, and in some cases just temporarily. And that makes you fine for your hobbies which you don’t spend more time on bc of your main focus. It’s bit of a tug of war. So you can either search and try to get it back or get rid of the boring projects forever. It can be very difficult and daunting, especially professionally, but there is always more and different work to be done somewhere.

My abandoned projects graveyard would be bigger than google's if I weren't just one guy.

I like games so started doing a Unity course, it was fun, but then I got bored and stopped. No real reason, I think something else just caught my eye and it's hard to go back.

I want to learn marketing automation so I installed Mautic but haven't gone much past that. The plethora of options (what feature to try first?) is paralysing.

I help out with a Wordpress site and think making plugins would be neat, so I made one to help test some stuff, and that scratched the itch and now I don't really feel like doing it anymore even though it would be useful (and maybe profitable?) to learn.

These were all fun and interesting I just seem to lose interest very quickly (a few days) and want to do something with more novelty. Probably the most productive way this manifests is cooking, at least we get to eat a bunch of new recipes. Today I'm making bread but hopefully I can also finish setting up this email series :)

You just haven't found something that you're interested in which also happens to intersect with being useful, yet.

Exploring more interests and different ways of doing things changed a lot of things for me.

Things can also change when you know how to do things in a way that aligns with you. I used to hate cooking, but found my take on it.

That assumes that there is such an intersection and that there is enough leisure time to get there. Most people need to figure out how to feed themselves and pay the bills before they can meander across that intersection of utility and entertainment. Especially due to the added competition from everyone else pursuing passion projects, like acting or working in the videogame industry. Everyone wants to do it, which drives average wages down.