I am professionally a software developer for 8 years and I simply don't have ideas for personal projects (Can't find any problem that I can fix with programming). At times I feel like that's natural and I shouldn't worry about it. But on the other hand, I do like to imagine having something personal that I can work on so that even if some days on my main job are not satisfying, I can always work on my hobby project and find that missing satisfaction.
End goal here is obviously to get better sleep as sometimes my mind feels dissatisfied with the day's work.
Funnily, I day-dream about the idea of already having done the boring parts (simply manifesting a project that already exists) of some personal project and only solving exciting problems in relation to adding a new feature or exciting aspects.
This creates a problem as I hate staring at a blank file not knowing what to write.
Why do we devs have this weird need to do our jobs in our free time. We put this weird career specific cultural pressure for some reason.
Do other careers have this need to do work in your free time? You don't see brick layers itching to work on building a little house on the side, or lawyers just looking for a case to practice on.
Why is it just devs?
Because, (and not sure about your upbringing, speaking for myself and possibly those who agree) we entered the field because of our dream to get paid for what is effectively hours of our favourite activity: tinkering with our home computer (that dad forbade us from touching as we often broke something) and building cool stuff. I still remember the day I used Turbo C compiler to compile the "Hello, World!" program and the feeling of seeing the result made me happy and excited. My immediate thought was "what else can I do with this!".
I often tried implementing graphics in turbo C. The horrors of trying to find the cause of out of bound scribbling mess that my drawing code produced is quite nostalgic to this day.
I guess most of the current struggle is to just reproduce that joy that we got once.
You're not wrong, and I can't believe how spot on you are. I do enjoy dev, and it is something I do in my spare time, I did break the family computer by tinkering and Dad did tell me not to do it again, and I'm still chasing that excitement of the "Mr. T" calculator app I wrote in Haskell 15 years ago.
I think I just want my job to be just a job the days, instead of this pressure to keep growing, learning the latest tech and keeping up with changes, and then needing to have a portfolio or personal projects to show that I'm still capable.
Maybe I'm just feeling this way at the moment because I'm job searching and it's so disparaging to be asked what favourite blogs are or the link to my portfolio website or github, or my favourite new feature of language X, and I just think I'm not that person. I've tried reading the books in my spare time and setting up an AWS dev account, but I just don't care.
Sorry, I just think your post set something off in me about how weird it is that we make this expectation of ourselves only in this industry it seems, and I think the pressure might be a bit unproductive at times.