You never get the felling that you are doing something that most other people can not do. You never get the feeling that you are at the edge of human knowledge on a particular subject. A good developer is irreplacable and has an extremely rare set of skills, that's why they get paid so much more than a dishwasher or a farmer.

If you care about being better than other people and gauge your self-worth based on that. Some people actually do their job and feel happy with their life, friends, family, interests, etc.

Sometimes you go into a coding problem not knowing if you are going to be able to solve it. And that pay off when you do manage to solve it is just awesome.

I think you can do that anyway as a hobby and are more likely to find things like that than in 95% of the day job programming jobs out there.

I think the nature of the work differs more than the technicalities; working on a farm has direct relationship with survival and life. Staring at a flat 2D screen all day working on a problem defined by some guy for some online thing or a research project is all just stuff and money magically arrives due to a series of agreements and luck, doesn't quite have the same feel to it. We programmers work on jobs that are probably the most qualified as "magic" than any other; we cast funny spells and demons in the machine do our bidding.

It's the same reason why eating an egg laid by chickens that you keep in your back garden is far more satisfying than picking up an egg from a packet that was vaguely produced somewhere and transported somehow and put in a sterile place, packed with materials from some place, that you bought with your magic money from someone you don't know at a faceless supermarket. Same for catching fish, growing vegetables, etc. It tastes better. It's not just the physical thing but what went into it.

Primitivism ain't all that, of course. Computers and driving cars and medicine and fast food and Internet are all fun and convenient. But there's a very strong feeling in all of us, I think, for a simpler life that we understand from end to end in a real, psycho-physical way. Modern life is convenient, but not really simpler.