Ask HN: How to care about work again?

I was fired shortly after WFH orders came into place in Canada, in large part because the lack of options for things to do made my job the overwhelming focus of the day and I lost the will to do the relatively menial developer tasks (building a website for a pdf based product using next.js) that were asked of me in a timely manner. I may have burnt out, I'm not sure. I'm not depressed, but I can't bring myself to really be enthusiastic for any given thing I could apply to. I think this is in part fed by being burnt (and burnt out) in the past, the significant time and energy investment in getting a job, but also the somewhat dispensable nature of most companies and tech products. It all just strikes me as "some tech crap that I'll never see put to use". It's tough to find a connection of any kind with the output of what is usually either quite dull intellectual work or very hard intellectual work.

The thought of assembling react apps for an arbitrary company is saddening and I can't focus on something I'm not intrinsically interested in. Not that building websites is not interesting, but it seems like the output is often very mundane compared to how how arduous some frontend architectures have become.

By contrast, I can focus very well on sufficiently difficult and impactful projects, most likely where I have some control in the decisions made about the project. Likewise, I have no delusions that I'm some slept on PHD candidate that is too good for basic work. But I don't really know where to go from here. Do I continue just sort of enjoying the summer like I have every other time I've left a job, perhaps spending my time on creating something or contributing to OS?

A good example of the previous, is that I was working on something I hadn't before in a domain that I'd never touched. Specifically figuring out how to compress files and embed them as attachments in PDF documents in the PDF product that we were working on. It involved understanding zlib and hex file signatures and compression methods. That said, the rest of the job included customer service responses and random troubleshooting for customers who used the SDK, something that made me dread coming into work and something that they did not make clear during the hiring process.

Do you have any personal experiences like this you'd share? What have you done when you've concluded that most stuff just isn't compelling enough to even get you out of bed for the morning meeting?