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At this point, the only "hobby" I have is programming. I don't even know what else I like anymore.

Well, that's on you, but the good news is that you can change that as soon as you want. Why not start today?

I've been trying for the past 6 months, but I keep coming back to programming. Old habits die hard.

What of complementary hobbies?

Digital signal processing and music for example.

Keep trying new hobbies until one of them sticks! There will come a point where you find a hobby that will fulfill you in ways that programming can not.

For me that is writing poetry and making music for myself, which I randomly stumbled upon after having had so many other hobbies in the past besides programming

Don't think about it as sacrificing programming, but as an extension or alternative to your favorite hobby. As for concrete suggestions:

- sports is an obvious one. Bonus points for team sports where you'll get a different community / social circle for free

- as others suggested music is great way of playfully easing into different activities. A fun start would be Melodics ( https://melodics.com ). If you'd like to keep it close to programming take a look at Max/MSP. Play around with a software synth, or get a hardware one like Korg's entry level offerings. If you'd like to move up to advanced levels, take a look at Ableton Live + Push, which is a very play- AND powerful way of learning a DAW.

It is totally ok to just enjoy programming!

Do all people who paint water colours also have some other totally different unrelated hobby they are just as passionate about, like motorcycle restoration? I'd wager not.

For me, running became a sort of "hobby" as such - I guess you could call that "sport". What were the other things you were thinking about at school when you "played it safe"? Never too late to learn/relearn things.

It is also good to acknowledge to yourself, who you are, and stop looking around at others, feeling guilty and making excuses. If you want to code 12 - 18 hours a day, and you are not neglecting other responsibilities, then go for it. Don’t apologize to yourself that you aren’t into biking, marital arts, cooking, or skydiving.

I’m speaking to myself, BTW. I have spent a good portion of my life of explaining it to others and questioning it myself. I started programming in the 80’s though, and I had to fight through a wall of people with the mindset that computers were inherently “evil” and treated with high suspicion because they were not commonly understood. Yes, I grew up in a backwater.

This is well put. I've thought the same many times, and it is so hard to reason. Programming, at it most basic, is an expression of creativity. Lacking programming i would crave another outlet. But programming for years quite literally changes the way you think about problems, so it is hard to say what you would be like without it.

I suppose cooking might have actually been the best avenue. I find that the more i cook the more i draw parallels. It's quite associative and borderline object-oriented. I watch cooking shows where a dish is mentioned and the chef immediately starts building a menu in his head. It reminds me of when someone asks a programmer to design a blog/website/etc.

In what other field do you have so much control and freedom to create?

No matter how much someone directs you on how to program something, you always have that little bit of wiggle room to add your own creativity to it.

Programming is like art. The coding is the medium. The thoughts and solutions, when it all works together, just feels right.

My job when it goes into stuff other than programming, I find myself coding at night to feel that structure, control, creativity and freedom all rolled into one.

Most other fields don't offer that.

A lot of fields offer those things, they just don't also offer high pay.

Listening to the little nagging voice of career sensibility stops being a good idea if you're not going to then turn that quality salary and employment security in to a base for a fun life.

If not programming, that 20% of your brain would have been thinking about whatever else it is you did for a job.

I think it would be a lot less than 20%. It's so much easier to context switch into and out of the "work" mindset in other fields.

By default, this "computer brain" of mine is carried with me when I leave work. I have to make a concentrated effort to context switch back into "real life" mode (similarly how I have to context switch into "computer" mode). I think that's why so many of the good programmers are a little weird and introverted, because they don't bother to context switch back.

I think it's easy to imagine that we could have been something else; but I suspect that programming, or something substantially similar to it, is probably the only thing you'd be happy with.

Personally, I always felt that if I'd been born 50 years earlier law, architecture, and mathematics would have been good alternatives. I've also been taking painting classes for a couple years and have found great logical structure and consistency in it despite the creative freedom it provides.

Art is art!