When the Obsession Went Silent

I built my entire identity around technology for a decade. Then one day it stopped exciting me anymore.

In 2014 I walked out of engineering school with a degree and no idea what came next. Everything had to be built from scratch. One brick at a time.

Was I prepared? Not at all. I was a tiny fish in a very large ocean.

I started by building a resume full of skills I didn’t have. It was impressive enough to land interviews. In reality it was full of lies. I was confident during introductions. The moment technical questions arrived, I fell apart. Those were the hardest punches I had ever taken. At first I ran. Eventually there was nowhere left to run.

One evening I sat down and rewrote everything I had lied about on that resume. Then I started learning it for real. Months of work led to a small project. That project landed an internship. The internship landed a job. The career moved fast after that. The hiccups were there but manageable.

If someone asked about my obsession, the answer was always technology. It consumed me for a decade. Every spare hour went into digging deeper, acquiring new skills, learning new tools, exploring new ideas. I advocated for it, influenced people toward it, inspired others into it. I never imagined I would ever feel detached from this love.

Then something shifted, I got laid off. The sound of keyboard keystrokes was agitating me. New technology announcements stopped feeling exciting. Conference talks stopped feeling relevant. Books from writers I had admired stopped pulling me in. The thing that had defined me for more than a decade was going silent.

Will that obsession come back? Will I ever feel that same love again? I don’t have an answer. I am still exploring.