I've definitely noticed the same in my career. Its easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget some of the reasons you got started doing all this in the first place (in my case, because its fun and I'm passionate about software/hardware).

On a whim, I decided to invest time in writing down one idea per week of anything fun I could hack on. It doesn't really matter whether or not I go through with it, I keep the stakes low: just write an idea down. That way it forces me to think about things I could build for myself or others/friends/family without much cognitive investment.

The end result has not only had a nonzero impact on my motivation to start new projects, it has impacted my ability to actually follow through. And I've noticed the practice has made the ideation loop happen more frequently than once per week over time.

The embedded world awaits you:

https://microengineer.eu/2018/05/01/diy-night-clock-projecto...

Weather Station using LilyGo T-Display S3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VntDY9Mg7T0

https://github.com/goat-hill/bitclock

https://www.hackster.io/lmarzen/esp32-e-paper-weather-displa...

I read this post every few months to keep that spirit

https://justforfunnoreally.dev/

Just reorient your thinking to consider building CRUD web apps as fun.

I feel this so bad, I used to make little software that solves my problem, now whenever I want to build anything I think about "is it going to be useful for my resume?" instead of fun things and I always quit because it then put lots of pressure on me for building "useful but not fun" projects.

Get into solar! You can cobble things together pretty reliably to do fun things.

100% - after I left my last startup I was in that frame; I did recurse.com and it really helped rekindle that spirit.

Rekindle it! Intrinsic curiosity…

But what stack will you use!