>You will soon find yourself not caring about the work at all (hard to get out of bed and go to work), will not find much to talk about with coworkers (conversations will get shorter and have less content, just smaller and smaller small talk) and worse you will no longer be getting anything out of being there, barely contribute and your growth as an engineer will stop.
This somewhat summarizes how I've been feeling the past 6-8 months or so. Not quite this extreme, but in the same vein.
It doesn't help that my social life hasn't been the greatest. I relocated to a major city for the career opportunities, but in doing so alienated myself from my friends and family on the opposite coast. I find I'm quite tired all the time, and generally apathetic towards most things.
I am doing good at my job, and all my performance reviews have been very positive. Yet it's unclear if they're positive due to my direct contributions, or the general performance of my (high-performing) team.
>you will eventually sound like a broken record of failed I want or should do x,y,z instead of someone that tried to do something new to better themselves work wise to improve.
This is a fear of mine, but the problem is I don't have any value to assign to x, y, or z. Part of me wants to start a startup, but I have no brilliant idea, no investment connections and no experience with anything other than software engineering. I'm also unsure if this is a desire to have a more flexible lifestyle or if I actually want to do a startup.