Basically I had grown really tired of solving every problem in the same way (create a new class, getters, setters... the same ol' object oriented stuff). And so I dove into Haskell which required new solutions to problems. And it made programming novel again for me. I was a beginner for the first time in over a decade; it was really challenging, and there were tons of new concepts that never popped up in the other mainstream languages.
The thing I loved was that it allowed and encouraged me to find the _best_ solution to a problem, as opposed to just 'something that works'.