The hidden burnout devs face even when they love the work

There's a burnout that shows up even when you love the work. Not the "I hate my job" kind or the "my manager invented six new priorities" kind. The quiet one that hits when you open VS Code waiting for that familiar spark and get nothing back. Not boredom. Not frustration. Just emptiness, like your brain went null and refused to reassign itself. This developer describes it as the moment when "loving code wasn't protecting me anymore."

The passion trap is believing that enthusiasm scales infinitely. For a long time it works. Passion is powerful early game, when everything feels new and your skill tree is wide open. But loving something deeply doesn't mean you can do it forever without consequences. If anything, it makes you blind to the warning indicators your brain is quietly logging in the background. You ignore fatigue because "this is who I am." You skip rest because "I should be able to handle this." You treat enthusiasm like infinite mana when really it leaks like unpatched memory.

The drift toward burnout is quiet. Coffee stops helping. PR reviews feel heavier than they should. Tasks that used to energize you start feeling like latency. Even simple deploys feel risky, like you've lost internal trust in your own brain. What makes it worse is that nothing is technically wrong. No toxic manager, no nightmare deadlines, no broken pipeline. This is the burnout devs don't talk about, the version that shows up even when work is reasonable and your tasks genuinely interest you.

The rebuild isn't dramatic. It's messier. More like refactoring crusty legacy code you inherited from yourself. The first step is stopping the pretense that you have infinite energy. Not a productivity hack. Not a meditation routine. Just accepting you're human, not a compute instance running on on-demand capacity. Cut side projects that turned into unpaid emotional labor. Ask the forbidden question: does this really need to be this complicated? Half the time the answer is no. Build something silly and pointless that gives you that old spark back. Real, stupid joy. The kind that shows up when you're not suffocating creativity with expectations. A long-term dev career is more about system design than passion. You build guardrails. You create boundaries. You budget mental energy like you budget compute. And you don't scale everything to max capacity just because it's technically possible.