Do You Actually Hate It? Or Is It A 'You' Problem?

I place a lot of weight on enjoying the stuff I choose to do. But often, I’ll be doing things that I loved a few weeks ago, and suddenly think ‘this sucks, why am I doing this?’. The question then becomes - do I actually genuinely enjoy what I’m doing, or is there a fixable problem that is preventing me from enjoying it?

I think this is a really hard problem, so here’s how I’m trying to answer it.

My first suspicion about why I might dislike something is that I suck at it. To test if I dislike something because I’m bad, I ask myself if I envy anyone who is an expert in the area. If I do, then its likely that I just need to get better to rekindle the love for it. This is why I dropped volleyball - I didn’t really watch volleyball competitively or cared about pro players. Bike touring and poker on the other hand, I can watch videos all day long, and I am sticking to those even though I am a beginner.

My next test is whether it’s a workflow issue. Repetition can always find a way to ruin things. A small while after I started computational chemistry work, I felt that running simulations, faffing around with linux, and copying and pasting files back and forth clusters was seriously getting in the way of my enjoyment. So today I spent the day figuring out how to reliably link my AI tools and IDE to the cluster via ssh and automate more standard workflows. My motivation has perked up again since I have to do much less grunt work

The next test, if other people are involved, is asking whether a project is going in the direction I want it to. To do this, I usually schedule a call and ask about whether people think the current way is most efficient. Either I’m convinced, or thankfully people trust me enough to find a decent compromise or go my way.

Finally, its upside. If this goes well, is my world significantly going to change for the better? Will any doors open? If I can dream of an ideal state that someone detached will reasonably go ‘wow’, then I’m usually happy with the upside. I’m not too strict or calculative about this though, because of estimation error.

If none of these things work, I’ll drop it.