I miss the pure excitement of learning to code.

There was something magical about running my first for loop with vanilla Ruby, or spinning up my first Rails app, or making my first successful request to a REST API.

Maybe it was so exciting because I was opening up a new door in my life, something that felt like it had endless, unlimited possibilities.

And it did! With those skills, I got my first six-figure job, felt fulfillment with my work, and even built my own business that allowed me to live and work anywhere in the world.

But nowadays, writing code isn’t all that exciting anymore. To be honest, it feels like a chore.

And it’s not just because I’m writing code for my business. I’m not even interested in learning new technologies or building “fun apps” like I used to. I have some cool ideas, but the idea of building them doesn’t even sound fun.

I miss that pure excitement I once had. I miss being able to code for hours and just have so much damn fun doing it, coding late into the night, and going to bed excited to wake up in the morning and keep coding.

I’m not going to sit here and hope those feelings will come back. Maybe they will, but probably not!

I think what’s important to remember is that I can have these feelings again but they’ll probably come from other parts of my life, and they’ll probably happen unexpectedly.

These feelings also don’t need to be work-related, nor technology-related. Just because I’m a tech nerd doesn’t mean I can only get excited about tech stuff!

I can geek out in the same way about sports, movies, writing, crafting, cooking, friendships, relationships, family, investing, music, art, politics, history, and so much more. 

Lately, I’ve been geeking out on tennis. Tennis is a little bit like coding, in a way. I get better at it as I keep working on it every day. I find new techniques. There is some mastery, and progress feels tangible. I have a lot of excitement for tennis.

Instead of being all nostalgic about the old, I just need to keep being curious and open to new things. Always switching it up.

As we get older, it’s conventional wisdom to stop trying new things, to “settle down”, to pick your hobbies, and get set in your ways.

But I think this is wrong. Life is about finding that pure excitement, over and over again.