I'm in a similar mindset although can't get my side project(s) going. Since 2019, my son was born, my brother died, and my mother is getting to the point where she won't be able to care for herself. We moved out of the Bayarea to my chagrin, to be closer to my wife's ageing parents in Portland. Didn't had any before, but having moved and new, it's even harder to make social connections no tech here. I feel you, and I believe you and are in the same place mentally; lacking passion, motivation, sense of belonging, purpose. I suspect maybe midlife sort of crisis? If you wanna have a convo. Ping me Lakota gmail.

Are you trying to do it all solo?

It's very hard to grind for many years on your own. If you want to grow your business, and you're already feeling a lack of motivation, that seems destined to fail if you try it alone.

Whatever path you choose, I highly recommend trying to bring someone alongside. HN is good for finding folks to work with.

Aside from any diagnoses or assessing burnout, I’d suggest thinking about what is actually causing the lack of motivation when you sit down. Working on a business is different from coding, per se. You might lack motivation to work on your business specifically or to generally be figuring out business problems. All coding is not equal — are you coding bug fixes, new features, solutions architecture? These all kind of have different underlying requirements and you might find that some motivate you more than others. For me, bug fixes are necessary but draining. The days where I spend 8 hours putting out those fires absolutely suck. Doing the “create a puzzle and build the solution” stuff is way more exciting, fulfilling, and motivating for me.

Your business revenue can really help you out in this department. If it happens to be that you lack motivation for specific things, can you hire those out and focus on working on the things that actually give you joy and satisfaction?

The suggestion of therapy is a good one, but I think that figuring out the root causes of your lack of motivation is also a good first step. So when you sit down to work and can’t get going, ask yourself “what am I trying to do, why am I doing it, why don’t I want to, and would handing this off to somebody else give me motivation to move onto the next thing.”

Maybe the answer is to sell the business and find something else that’s exciting to work on, or just to give your mind the space to recover.

Best of luck!

I've been wondering this myself lately, there's a (very) subtle difference between this and burnout, whereby I'm sometimes productive, but I screw a lot of time away "trying" to do work when I'm not mentally engaged enough to actually do it. Burnout happens when I have no agency and am not productive enough for a long time, and then hit a wall where I literally can't imagine programming anymore. I also personally had a family member die and got laid off around 2016, and that definitely helped me burn out around that time. What's different since then is that while I'm now in a software career again, I've learned that it doesn't matter... at all, and I shouldn't try too hard to convince myself that it should. In 2016 I was of the mindset that if I was doing it for work, I should be doing it on my spare time too, and that's sufficient to cover my hobbies, but now I realize that's basically stupid and represents a lack of imagination and diversity that a healthy life should have. It turns out that not leaving the house and staring at a screen for a majority of ones time is fucking miserable no matter how much you're making doing it. Dramatic life events are good for learning that there's so much more that matters, and most products and most code basically don't. Should a CPA go home and maintain enthusiasm for filling out forms and engaging with bureaucracy, submitting taxes just for the hell of it?

So I do small bits of staring at screens in my spare time, but non-work time is so scare that I consider it too expensive to waste telling computers what to do, and this does help preserve some capacity to do it when it's necessary.

I would not recommend asking people on HN to diagnose you. It is not that people on here don't have good advice and experience - they do. But everyone only knows their own life. People with depression will tell you it is 100% depression, while people with anxiety will tell you it is 100% anxiety, and people with burnout will tell you it is 100% burnout. Other people will tell you to go outside, or to eat low carb, or to lift weights. Basically, you'll get a pile of anecdotal advice from people who are not living your life, and don't know all the possibilities of what could be wrong, including that there could be an underlying medical problem.

The more important factor is that you know something is wrong and you want to fix it. Your best bet is to talk to a doctor and/or therapist about it. Get a professional diagnosis of what is actually wrong (or a confirmation that nothing is wrong and this is normal), and then filter out anecdotal advice that isn't applicable to that diagnosis.