I often say that I should quit and start up a goat farm but aside from economic reality, I know that in a number of years I’ll burn out on that too. I’ve done manual labour shovelling mud through months of 5°C rain. It’s not fun. I know that. But still when the weather starts being nice I imagine that I want to go work filling potholes or something manual labour that is “fulfilling”.

I think we’re just a bit too comfortable - and bored.

There’s also a lot of people in the middle of their career who “learned computers” as kids and went into a career they were excited about. Now, tech isn’t exciting. Tech companies are building surveillance state apparatus to sell ads. That’s a pretty tough sell to someone who joined hoping to build something that will make the world better.

This isn’t new. The HN thread brings up Office Space which is almost 30 years old at this point. Then there’s the joke about senior devs seeing themselves as farmers in ten years.

Once you do something you’re excited about for a couple decades you start to be less excited about it.