#serious-thoughts I remember when I first graduated in March 2020, and dove headfirst into my first full-time job at Quora later that year in September. I worked a bit excessively my first year from excitement -- I got along well with my coworkers and I gained responsibility relatively quickly as I became the engineering lead for home feed within a year. Now I'm at my third job post-graduation at this point and I want nothing to do with responsibility and making decisions and mental hoops to jump through. My brain fog outweighs my intrinsic motivation at this point and everything starts to seem so difficult as I try to make as many excuses to myself as possible not to do something. I went to an [[social exhaustion|onsite]] recently and it gave me even more of a crisis seeing so many people be amazing and productive and all I want to do is just sit and rot and pretend my brain is being eaten up by worms. I'm having an actual quarter-life crisis right now because I really like software engineering but I hate working as a software engineer. About a month ago, my friend J pitched me to help him and his family on some agriculture software. I said yes of course, because we've worked together on smaller projects before and I liked working with him, but also in the interest of extra cash. I started working with more technologies that haven't existed since the last time I was working on personal projects back in college. Vercel, Supabase, and Railway are pretty neat. AI is a huge enabler for my productivity. I started working on an app in React Native, which I haven't touched since LA Hacks back in 2018 or something. And we worked quickly. An app, a server, and two frontend repos were initialized in the span of a month with around 32000 lines of code in total. Within a month. And I'm essentially the sole developer. How am I way more productive and motivated by goat software than what I'm actually being consistently paid for? lol it feels problematic I'm still determining the sole cause of these feelings because it's the primary thing causing me unhappiness and dissatisfaction right now. I thought about joining a startup, but I dislike the idea of needing to hustle and only receiving 5% of the company's stake or whatever and having to significantly reduce my cost of living (unfortunately lifestyle inflation is a huge Bella problem). Like, is it because I don't care for working on something to increase shareholder value? I feel so anti-corporate right now and maybe what I really need is a sabbatical or something but the idea of not making money for a long period of time sounds daunting. I know that I'm talented (because people tell me so), but the intrinsic motivation is no longer there and it feels like I'm struggling with my own identity.