This is most people, at most jobs, TBH.

TBF working a full time job has sucked the soul out of me. The last thing I want to be doing on my free time is be on more computers. I used to be a kid eager about technology but now I am actually a boomer. I have a hard time using smart TV's now a days.

People may have other things in their life that may mean they don't have the luxury of time to spare on these sort of things.

When I had kids all of my hobbies stopped. There is no time left for anything non-essential.

I simply no longer have the time - or frankly mental energy - for curiosity. Right now I am typing this while supervising bath time for a 3 year old.

If my experience is generalizable, it's going to get better when the kid turns 4. By 9 I was able to go back to spending real energy on hobbies, especially if I wake up early enough.

Hang in there!

Note: this seems like it only applies if you're putting your children into a school. If you're homeschooling that "free time" doesn't materialize. It also doesn't happen if you have two children (or more) a couple of years apart, as their school start and end times won't sync up except a few times over the course of > decade.

I had a friend gently remind me that the reason he can be prolific at writing music these days and i "can't seem to find the time" is because i've raised 2 and currently am raising a third, and if he had kids he wouldn't write music either. My youngest turned 7 this year. Older two are out of the house.

I felt that way when I was fresh out of school, now I find that my life is greatly improved by spending less time on (or thinking about) computers outside of work and more outdoors, doing some kind of physical activity.

A _lot_ of IT these days, at least at software companies, is more akin to retail work (inventory, rotation, shipping/delivery logistics, compliance and permissions management) than tech support. This also makes it an attractive vector for tech/trade colleges because they can directly map such experience to higher-paying, less-seasonal work than retail.

It's still a good foot-in-the-door role for people who still can't access education or job experience reqs for tech, but it's also now one of the roles where you can just park, work 9-5, get a better wage than retail, and not have to corral shopping carts. The tech end of internal IT support has moved more to SRE/ops roles.

Hardware company IT is marginally more interesting but it's still more interested in tagging hardware than understanding it.

When I'm in concentration mode for 8+ hours a day in tech, the last thing I want to do is fuck around with a misbehaving home lab. I used to have a server and switches and NAS and firewall etc. But got sick of troubleshooting unnecessary complexity. Now I've got a NAS and a desktop. My tinkering years are over and I just want things to work. That shit loses it's charm over time.