Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?

For the first time since graduating, I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments, and had a look at what life and the world have become in the past 10 or so years. And I've discovered that the main focus of pretty much all of my life fails to excite me anymore - my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over. And I'm left asking myself: What now?

Let me explain where I'm coming from: Probably like most of you, I've been exposed to computers at an early age. My first conscious memory of using a computer is playing the original Pong on a black and white TV at a friends house when I was 6 or 7. Since then I've been hooked. When my father got an Amstrad CPC when I was 10 or so I could spend hours on end playing on it, playing with it, reading up on how it worked, later on copying code listings from magazines and finally deciding to learn to program it myself. There were to many things and concepts to explore, learn and figure out. From there I moved on to PCs, fiddling with hardware, learning about IRQs, IO Ports, memory management. Moving on the programming side from BASIC to Pascal, C and Assembler.

And then discovering Linux and Open Source in the mid 90s. Ever more concepts to explore: How does networking work, what is this crazy web thing and what can be done with it, getting into DNS and mail servers. And at the same time being exposed to new programming languages and paradigms seemingly at every turn: Prolog, Java, Scheme/Lisp, Perl and PHP. And on the system side it seemed like there was a new minor revolution every other week, introducing ever more possibilities: A new kernel, a new samba version, the advent of P2P. And on the cultural side of open source there were lots of competent people freely sharing their ideas, teaching, showing, comparing notes. It was a high energy environment, constantly pushing forward.

My main source of fascination came from the exploring of new concepts, and understanding how everything worked and fit together. I stuck to one topic until I understood it, consequently losing interest and moving on to the next bit to explore (pardon the pun).

I graduated shortly after 9/11 and the dot com bubble bursting. Just narrowly avoiding personal bankrupcy on my first stunt as a freelancer which I ventured into with my youthful optimism/arrogance, I consciously started shutting out everything distracting me from financial recovery and keeping my respective job.

Welcome to the treadmill.

Now, nearly 10 years later I'm having my first real look around in a long time and I'm not terribly happy about what I'm seeing. The Open Source revolution seems to be over; very few new things have happened there in these past years. It's all about maturity and stability now, no longer aggressively pushing forward.

And it seems that the children of the revolution turned the gold to chrome, scrambling to squeeze a buck out of anything a buck can be squeezed out of. Instead of the free sharing of ideas I grew up with, I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing of general topics, but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.

Todays big topics leave me pretty much unenthused. As a not particularly social person I fail to be fascinated by the social web. Mobile internet will be the big thing for the next few years, but for whatever reason I fail to be fascinated by gadgets that are the offspring of cell phones and my pentium from way back, reliving the DOS shareware scene through a centralized distributor. Server side scaling is all about variations on few well known themes: Add another cache/key-value store/nosql store, insert another abstraction layer, data and workload decentralization.

So I'm in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. And they all seem familiar. Is this how deep the rabbit hole goes? Did I really reach the end? Or did I just fall out of the loop at some point in the past few years and need a pointer in the right direction? Did I just get old and not notice it until now?

I'm sure some of you have experienced something similar. How did you move on? Did you manage to rekindle the flame somehow? What are your suggestions as to where I should go to from here and to ideally find new worlds to discover and explore?