> Maybe is because "just hangout with someone" is not clearly defined. What is the point? what do we want to talk about? I don't socialize a lot outside of work.

I felt this way for a very long time. Never had many friends growing up for much this reason; it didn't feel rewarding to spend time with anyone except my stepdad (my mentor, because I was always learning with him and he was one of the only people that made me feel safe) and my sports comrades (but only when we were practicing).

In adulthood, though, there's several people I enjoy so much that it seems worth it to spend a fair bit of effort just to be in their presence for some time. We don't even have to do anything particularly interesting. I don't understand why I want to be around them so much, but I do, and I wonder if this is the connection I've been missing the whole time.

The other weekend I took a six hour flight just to go on a hike with some of these people (there's plenty of hiking where I was already) because I missed them so much being away for work. It's like being hungry. Being around them is a dopamine hit.

For a while I only felt this way about a tiny handful of people I met in grad school so it seemed like the same sort of thing where you spend a lot of time and effort at a hobby and then find that you are passionate about it. Spend a lot of time (and college type bonding experiences) with some people and you'll find you're passionate about your friendship. But then in my early thirties I met a couple new friends and the same feeling happened within days of meeting them, so I don't understand the dynamic at all. What makes someone fall in love with their friends?

Apologies for going off on a tangent here. It was a thought provoking comment.

> Now if we examine our life, our relationship with another, we shall see that it is a process of isolation. We are really not concerned with another; though we talk a great deal about it, actually we are not concerned. We are related to someone only so long as that relationship gratifies us, so long as it gives us a refuge, so long as it satisfies us. But the moment there is a disturbance in the relationship which produces discomfort in ourselves, we discard that relationship. In other words, there is relationship only so long as we are gratified. This may sound harsh, but if you really examine your life very closely you will see it is a fact; and to avoid a fact is to live in ignorance, which can never produce right relationship. If we look into our lives and observe relationship, we see it is a process of building resistance against another, a wall over which we look and observe the other; but we always retain the wall and remain behind it, whether it be a psychological wall, a material wall, an economic wall or a national wall. So long as we live in isolation, behind a wall, there is no relationship with another; and we live enclosed because it is much more gratifying, we think it is much more secure. The world is so disruptive, there is so much sorrow, so much pain, war, destruction, misery, that we want to escape and live within the walls of security of our own psychological being. So, relationship with most of us is actually a process of isolation, and obviously such relationship builds a society which is also isolating. That is exactly what is happening throughout the world: you remain in your isolation and stretch your hand over the wall, calling it nationalism, brotherhood or what you will, but actually sovereign governments, armies, continue. Still clinging to your own limitations, you think you can create world unity, world peace - which is impossible. So long as you have a frontier, whether national, economic, religious or social, it is an obvious fact that there cannot be peace in the world.

— From The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti, Chapter 14: Relationship And Isolation

I love this perspective on passions and finding joy in the practical. As a former smoker, I used to get a nicotine rush while having conversations in person or over the phone (while smoking). Once that went away, 5+ years ago, I found that I enjoyed conversation less and really needed to make an effort to initiate and continue it. That hasn't gone away, so I'm hoping to get some other good perspectives on the later half of your comment.

It’s fascinating how similar your experiences are to my own. I wonder how many of us there are.

I’m also in the same place in my life where I’ve realized that I need to develop a passion for people and relationships. I have been out of balance in recent years focusing far too much on my career and technology. I think it’s an easy thing to do and offers a more measurable and explicit reward, so I gravitate toward it.

Some games are very social. I get the chance to meet people playing online games I never would have had the chance to meet, from all over the world. I've spent whole Sunday mornings discussing life, the universe, and everything with people I just met, all while we completely ruin the opposing team.

I've been programming as an adult for something like, 15 years, but I've always had a bit of a difficult balance with formalism and creativity (as well as personal opinion / preference). Have MSc in CS. But I've been hacking away at computers since since I was very young.

I lost something of myself through all my education and in work - namely - be creative. If you grow into that top .1% or whatever, everything becomes 'so serious' in maintaining that position because you effectively become an authority figure in it.

HN recently introduced me to INTERCAL and something just clicked where I was like, this can all be completely ridiculous, AND well done??? It was like all the rules of consistency, analysis relaxed, heavily. I don't have to have a mind that is perfectly structured for all things. I can balance a perspective that is diametrically opposite to all the rules and something can still be built really well.

There's something so serious about programming that has often kept me a neurotic mess about it, always keeping my sense of humor about it cleanly compartmentalized away from my code. I started working on a PhD and the pressure to make everything perfect got to me. I work as a software developer and the pressure to plan code everyone can learn and grow from turned me into an asshole!

There's always plenty of learning to be done but there's not always going to be someone whose going to be able to tell you how to get out of a 'passion rut' for you, and I'd imagine over a lifetime of passion you'd wind up experiencing plateus like that with a fair amount of frequency. Whether you find your passion early or late, maintaining interest for all that time you have can be really tough. It's something people sometimes have to help one another with and sometimes it is something one has to work hard for independently as well.

I really agree with the stress free aspect. My first solution to reduce stress was 'go really slow', tortoise versus the hare mentality. I found myself in a sort of social competition puzzle that wasn't fun and was draining me all of my brain resources automatically, as one side effect. Funny that INTERCAL is that bit of radical novelty dijkstra was talking about, for me. It's just all done the opposite, but for me - it's exactly what my mind and social life turn into when code has to be 'perfect'.

> Maybe is because "just hangout with someone" is not clearly defined. What is the point? what do we want to talk about? I don't socialize a lot outside of work.

I don't socialize much myself either, because sometimes it seems like there is supposed to be a point, but - nitpicking over that mentality in the way one might nitpick over code ... I think that's the wrong way to view relationships.

Also, it's currently on sale on Kindle (looks like $2.22 on the US store, $2.99 on the Australian store). I'm not sure what I think of the book yet, but people I respect have rated it highly.

Also the work from Angela Lee Duckworth are on this subject.

https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_powe...

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance https://g.co/kgs/tprZP4

That is an excellent book, and expounds on the ideas in this article.

Thank you - this sounds like a little gem.

I can vouch for this.

> I've found that usually when people say they're "passionate" about something, what they're really saying is that they have a deep yearning for the high social status they would attain if they were great at or well-known for that thing.

This is you projecting your own motivations onto others.

Most everyone would agree that it's not really a passion if you don't devote much time to it.

Not really:

3. Find a job you love. Cuban says there's an easy way to tell if you've found a job that can help you build a career.

"If it matters how much you get paid, you are not in a job you really love," he writes. This doesn't mean that you should not strive to make as much money as possible, but you need to prioritize your passion over your paycheck if you want to put yourself on a rewarding career path that allows you to thrive.

"If you love what you do so much that you are willing to continue to live like a student in order to be able to stay in the job, you have found your calling," Cuban writes.

4. Be the best you can be. Once you've found your calling, whatever it is, you should have only one goal, Cuban says: "to be the best in the world at it."

Funny, I feel like before 12 is when our brains are free of social constraints and are most free to determine what is enjoyable or not. 5 year olds certainly know what they like.

People = Children and Adults below

I think it's a social expectation based on selection bias. i.e. I dont think many people are capable of developing passion. That's not to say the average person doesn't have interests or are uninteresting, but few people go out of their way to focus on something that is internally constructive (autodidact, hobbies, art ) as opposed to externally constructive (e.g. tv, video games, internet). Another way to put it, an artist's distraction is their art.

Im speaking from an armchair, and as someone who discovered my passion at a young age (10). Throughout the following 18 years, I rarely met people who are >= mildly obsessed over something internally constructive (granted, I didnt go to college).

The flip side though is that the business minded artists often produce the most banal work. James Patterson has made 700 million dollars over a decade from his writing and cowriting. His books dominate the shelves, but as art they barely rise to pulp status. Yet his latest novel is cowritten with ex-president Bill Clinton.

He's created value, of course. But what he does isn't art, its mass production of kitsch on an industrial scale.

I can't help but wonder if a planned economy would be better, someone who said "you're good enough, pursue this we will support you economically", or said "sorry you didn't make the cut you'll have to develop a passion for something else".

In my highly subjective view artists are expecting to get paid for something that most of us have the capability to participate in with reasonable results given a similar investment of effort; in other words, most artists differ from the general population not in artistic aptitude, but rather in the desire to be an artist. I would love to sit around and play with ideas for a living, but it doesn't pay the bills in my occupation.

I think this process also works in successful companies, to their detriment. Google, for example, is wildly successful and people who work their make a lot of money, so it attracts people whose main motivation is to make a lot of money (personally).

So you mean the tech industry ended up just joining ordinary unregulated free market capitalism?

Sounds sub-optimal, a pain point, like something ripe for disruption.

That's why I studied Computer Science instead of 'Game Design' in college. I've been designing and making games for most of my life in some form or another (currently board and card games, previously video games) in my spare time, and spent some time in the video game industry, but I got burned out after 4 years and then was able to get a much higher paying job by going back to the corporate world.

The coding problems I solve while coding feels similar (wrestling file formats and external frameworks, optimizing bottlenecks, automating routine processes, recording various data about users and what they do in the system, and debugging hairy multithreaded procedures exists in both industries), and overtime is much less common.

But even though what I work on now gets used by major corporations and assist hundreds of thousands of people, it's hard for me to feel passionate about complex Insurance Policy objects or setting up phone systems so people can get annoyed when a robotic voice is programmed to ignore them as they jab the 0 key or say "customer service" sixteen times because they want to skip the automated process and talk to a human.

And corporate development has its own share of problems, things that are completely out of your control often times, because the directives come down from on high.

And despite there being hundreds of different industries I could work for as a software developer, I imagine I'll still encounter a lot of the same frustrations, just with the veneer of a new problem domain. Past experience shows that learning that new problem domain will carry me and keep me interested in the job for the first year, but after that starts to fade. I suppose I could hop from job to job, but I'm getting older and getting more tied down (i.e. I just bought a house, planning a wedding right now, etc.)

So what do you do when you get burned out by your exit plan?