Lokey

There’s something cruel about loving something so much that you decide to make it your life, only to watch that love slowly suffocate under the weight of necessity.

For years, I lived in what felt like perfect alignment. My hobby was my profession—software engineering, front-end development, the art of translating vision into function. It was my canvas, my playground, my comfort zone. I could spend thirteen hours a day writing code and never feel like I was working.

Five hours for my job, five for side projects, three more researching new ideas. The remaining eleven hours split between three for downtime and eight for sacred, uninterrupted sleep. Weekends meant Saturdays with someone I cared about, Sundays back to eight hours of personal projects.

It sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? To me, it was paradise. Every line of code felt like a small act of creation. Every solved problem was proof that I could build something from nothing.

Until one day, I couldn’t anymore.

The shift happened gradually, then all at once. After losing my job, I threw everything into recovery—pushing at 200% capacity to prove I still had what it took. In two months, I completed a major project. I should have felt triumphant.

Instead, something broke.

The moment I finished, clarity abandoned me. Simple tasks became overwhelming. I found myself staring at screens that used to welcome me, now feeling like strangers. I started avoiding the work itself, finding elaborate ways to procrastinate—writing, anything but the thing I used to love most.

The spark was gone. The excitement, the passion that had defined me for so long—all of it, just gone.

I sought answers from everyone I trusted. The response was always the same: burnout, fatigue. Words I’d dismissed before as excuses, now landing with the weight of truth. I’d been humbled by my own limitations, forced to confront the reality that loving something doesn’t make you immune to losing it.

Their advice was simple: find a new hobby, move your body, step away from the screen.

So I started exercising in the mornings, cutting my side project hours to three. I picked up a guitar—partly as genuine interest, partly as a coping mechanism. Learning scales, pinch harmonics, trying to convince my pinky finger to cooperate with my intentions. Small victories in a different language.

But the deeper realization was harder to accept: what I’d thought was passion had become obligation. What felt like freedom had become a cage. The endless possibilities I’d once cherished now felt like endless demands.

Maybe this was always inevitable. Maybe mixing work with love is inherently dangerous, like trying to live inside a song you used to enjoy—eventually, you hear it too much to remember why it moved you.

I’ve come to understand that losing your hobby to your profession isn’t just about burnout. It’s about identity. When what you love becomes how you survive, you stop doing it for joy and start doing it for necessity. The relationship changes. The love changes.

And sometimes, to find your way back to loving anything, you have to accept that you can’t love the same things in the same way anymore.

So here I am, at the end of an unexpected journey that’s really just the beginning of another one. I’ve left my comfort zone not by choice, but by necessity. The thing that used to define me no longer fits.

It’s terrifying, existing without the certainty of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re good at. But maybe that uncertainty is where growth lives. Maybe losing your identity is the only way to discover what else you might become.

The screen still glows in front of me, but it no longer feels like home. And for the first time in years, that feels like possibility rather than loss.