When you are young you think you can become anything. You dream big and have tremendous reserves of creativity, and importantly, time to draw from. As you get older you begin to realize that you aren't special, you'll never get to be what you want, and more-or-less from birth you've be pre-ordained into a set of paths in your life and you can only choose one. Some people manage to break this in small ways, for example being the first to go to university and get a STEM degree. Though, it just opens a few more paths. You're still a cog. By the time you're 35 over half your useful life is gone, and the most important formative periods are long in the past. You're now a derelict ship flying through space solely on inertia waiting to slam into whatever is your final resting place.
Once I realized this I lost almost all of my passion for anything. I don't program outside work, I am by-and-large a luddite when viewed externally. I absolutely hate new technology and learning about it. It took over a decade of industry work grinding me to the bone and destroying my passion to do this. I wouldn't be so cynical, except that because I work 8-10 hours a day I don't even have much time pursue a replacement passion. I exist to serve. In this light "depression" is really a survival mechanism. If you start having hope of becoming something better after you leave school you'll just watch it be dashed right in front of you by some tech-moron you're working for. Or worse, the non-technical person turned "programmer".
Once I realized this I lost almost all of my passion for anything. I don't program outside work, I am by-and-large a luddite when viewed externally. I absolutely hate new technology and learning about it. It took over a decade of industry work grinding me to the bone and destroying my passion to do this. I wouldn't be so cynical, except that because I work 8-10 hours a day I don't even have much time pursue a replacement passion. I exist to serve. In this light "depression" is really a survival mechanism. If you start having hope of becoming something better after you leave school you'll just watch it be dashed right in front of you by some tech-moron you're working for. Or worse, the non-technical person turned "programmer".