I ultimately decided to leave tech when I realized I didn't care much about delivering value and actually just wanted to write beautiful code. The former was a nice bonus for me, but the latter was profoundly captivating.

I'd unfortunately tried to make that mismatch work for too long, and as a result I completely destroyed all of my programming interest via severe burnout.

If this resonates with whoever reads this: please take your passion seriously and protect it. I don't know if I'll ever be able to enjoy coding again, unfortunately.