Rinse & Repeat
Wake up. 7h30. Lift upper body, shift right, feet on the ground, ankles snap, one, two, clac, clac.
Go to the toilet, take a shower, make a coffee, and try to read a couple articles that will leave no trace on my memory afterward. I've been increasingly struggling with concentrating over the last three to four years.
Sit down on my gamer chair bought with the purpose of making 8+ hours in front of a screen more bearable. It is still really uncomfortable, I was better off with a generic and cheaper model.
Now, on to be ~45h per week inside my house office, solving tickets and implementing features for a piece of management software. The technology is not really interesting (Mostly PHP), and the kind of functionalities I churn out is in the likes of refining the billing process, adding static pages with some information for customers, or making a thing that is slow go a little faster. There is nothing wrong with this job, at least it doesn't have a harmful impact on the world, or not one that I can see.
I spend the majority of my working time alone, except the ten-or-so minute daily standup where the usual dynamic comes into play: what did you do yesterday, what are you working on today, what are your blockers.
I earn a good salary, even more so if I compare it with the average salary for a local software developer, provided that I work remotely for an established company in a rich European country.
I don't exhaust myself physically, I don't work crazy hours, and don't do double shifts. I can live a decent life in my hometown where I don't need to pay extreme attention to what I spend thanks to the lower cost of living.
Then, how come I keep struggling every single day to maintain concentration and care about my job? When I started out as a developer I sought out to have the current situation I find myself into. I was hungry and eager, ambitious, and dreamt of being able to work from anywhere in the world in a job with flexibility. Now that I have this freedom I realize I don't like my job to a point where I have a very hard time caring.
Over the years I'd been having different small epiphany-like moments where I started to doubt this kind of professional setup is made for me. After my initial 2 years as a developer where I very much gave my all and wanted to become the best engineer I could, in every job I had afterwards there came a point sooner or later where I'd have a moment where I could no longer fix my sight on the screen and be blocked out of my ability to code.
Sometimes it took 5 months, sometimes only 3, and the last time I started to feel the angst was 3 years into cofounding a startup where I kept developing 99% of my working time as I was the technical cofounder and there was where I could add the most value. My original idea was always to code at the beginning and then get away from VSCode as soon as we could hire people and stay in a more architectural and product-oriented role, albeit still with a technical side. It didn't work, and 2 years in, after developing the whole end-to-end application I already started to feel the inability to concentrate and care about my job as much as I did before.
Another one was 3 months into starting out as a fullstack developer in a startup in another country, and I'd come home for holidays and do some remote work. At some point, I spend three days staring at the computer screen without being able to write a single line of code, and I quit the moment I came back.
There is a contradiction here, where the thought that I know the place where my chances to get a job that pays well is in software development (as I've been doing it for a little over 7 years now) collides with the fact that it's been a while since I am no longer as productive as I was, and more time programming doesn't necessarily translate into me becoming a better professional.
Sometimes I envision how a good working day would look to me. Clues to that are everywhere. When I worked in-office for a bit, the days I felt the most energized were the ones I'd have some meetings where I could discuss with team members a technical challenge they had or I could learn about a process in the organization. I'd often have ideas about how to improve it. So, I am increasingly confident about the fact that I need to remove myself from the keyboard, at least from the coding aspect.
It is a tough and scary decision, I constantly battle against the fact that I might not find another job (much less one that pays this well) without prior experience in anything else than having a technical background. Life as it is now has multiple expenses: mortgage, insurance, the lot.
Oftentimes I wonder whether my issue is minor, that I just have to "push through it" and eventually it'll pass, and my problem is one of the cushy-spoiled-kid kind. What I can assure is that the misery is real.
Could it be a long-standing form of depression? burnout? I haven't been able to get a proper night of sleep in a long time and I feel exhausted all the time. I struggle to enjoy life living from my hometown, boxed-in the majority of the day speaking to no-one and coding stuff I don't care about.
I believe the answer to getting out of this rut lies in being able to take a leap of faith. If plenty of folks in reddit and hacker news managed to change their life, there must be something I can do.
There must be some steps I can take right? I am sure of it.