I can't code anymore

This may seem quite left field, but I used to be an artist in the games industry before I made a career change into software development. At the end of my art career, I got to a point where I just couldn't push my pencil around my plate anymore, I was spent.

Every game seemed derivative, nothing was new, I had no interest whatsoever in creating another muscly space dude with an unfeasibly large gun. It was a bit traumatic because I identified so strongly with being "an artist".

It took a good couple of years for that to wear off, until one day I eventually found myself picking up a pencil again. The old magic was back, if I wanted to draw something, it was for the same reason a five year old kid wants to, because I enjoyed it again.

Cut to 15 years later, and while I don't feel the same kind of burnout, I can feel a similar fatigue from repeating patterns in engineering, another API to build, another service to scale, another schema to design.

Creativity is like breathing, you can't just exhale all the time. You need some time to be idle, to just absorb, to be aimless..to inhale. Then..bam.. suddenly you get an idea, out of nowhere, and you're off to the races again, until the next time.

So yeah, take some time out, get some hobbies, something completely new. It's not all about being productive, find something that makes you feel alive!

/r/ExperiencedDevs Thread