6 Years of Burnout: My Journey Back to Loving Programming

I used to really love programming. I didn't really like it during my early college years, but I started to really like it later on when I started to get a good grasp on coding and was able to build my ideas. I love the feeling when I'm getting in the zone and start hyper-focusing on coding.

Late in college, I started to make money by doing the projects of my classmates and by freelancing until I got hired to work full-time by a company with a great salary. And then I started to be interested in building side projects. Over the years, I have built many side projects where like 95% of them have failed. I say the other 5% were kinda successful because they gained users and 1 side project gained a paying customer. It was a cycle of coming up with an idea, building it, launching and failing then starting over again.

This stopped completely when I got burned out from work (and probably because of the frustration that most of my side projects failed and didn't get any traction).

After years of job hopping, I started working for a startup for years and made great money that allowed me to buy a car and a house and have a comfortable life. Working on this startup was very tiring though because I was working for very long hours per day and work consumes the majority of my time daily. Overworking for a few years got me so burnt out that I started hating my job and started to lose my passion and interest in coding and completely stopped building side projects. The burnout lasted for 6 years.

For some reason, this year, I feel like I'm starting to recover from burnout and got interested in coding and building side projects again. It's probably because I significantly reduced the hours that I work per day (a few years where I probably only work for ~4 hours on weekdays) and started to consistently exercise and improve my diet for almost a year.

I recently started to build side projects again; to get the ball rolling, I just started to build simple websites or web apps that I can build very quickly like a speech to polished notes web app and a calm jobs website that scrapes job posts and calculates a work-life balance score to help job seekers find jobs with better work-life balance.

My personal experience of burnout inspired me to build it. After these initial side projects, I plan to start building more complicated ones.

Has anyone else gone through something similar?

How did you rediscover your love for programming?