I’m in a similar boat myself. I told myself I didn’t have any energy for things outside of work because of my job, though I never found the workload that overwhelming. I could get lost in the puzzle of the technical work and I’m good at it, but I ultimately found the work to be meaningless. At some point enterprise SaaS feels so abstract that even if in some sense it’s improving the world (helping companies work more effectively or what have you) I just can’t connect with it. Finally I quit and I’ve been fortunate enough financially to be able to take a long break. I found that even without a job I had no energy to do much and spent the better part of 2019 doing squat. Did a little freelancing at the beginning of the pandemic but was feeling the same old frustrations sink in (I can only learn so much from working on Node-backed web applications over and over).

Still figuring it out. I’m dipping my toes back in to programming a little learning Rust and embedded programming and it’s nice to feel the thrill (and frustration) of being clueless. I’m trying to get in touch with my creative side more with music. But mostly just taking it a day at a time, hiking a lot, cooking, and trying to find peace in the day-to-day rather than trying to push myself to be “productive” (whatever that means).