I am a programmer by trade but i feel so lost at this point. I lve been in the industry for like 4 years and i feel like i barely know anything. In some respects i feel like my skills have actually regressed since college. I have cool project ideas but i never see them to fruition. Tried for years to make a game on my own but barely got anywhere with it owing a lot to my lack of art skills and inconsistency in actually working on it. Made a robot and got about 5 lines into leg IK and just... gave up. I was into AI for most of college and took tons of classes on it at the expense of a well rounded foundation in a diverse set of topics but i have significant barriers to getting a masters anytime soon and so no chance of getting an AI job. I dont think ive done a single interesting project w.r.t. modern AI despite wanting to, plus its hard to do computationally heavy things on a busted ass decade old laptop. Was in game dev professionally and while i was shielded from things like crunch it was deeply unsatisfying and i would spend a lot of time on my phone/slacking off. I only worked with clients twice - one went ok but the work sucked, the second time they put me on a contract by myself and i melted down, failed to deliver anything and pissed off the client. So they just kept me on internal stuff that will never see the light of day for the rest of the time i worked there. New hires would immediately get more responsibility than i ever had because they were just straight up more competent, talented employees and i suffered a great deal of imposter syndrome as a result despite trying to improve myself. Even with adderrall i just failed to get anything useful done or motivate myself except at the very very end when i did make a pretty neat feature that i was happy with even if it wasnt perfect.

Then I lost my job and for a while i really did try to like, do neetcode, refresh my dsa knowledge and such, work on projects. But 2 months passed and i received nothing but silence or the rare rejection on all of my job applications, nor have any of my former coworkers. More and more devs get laid off every week. I havent touched an IDE in over a month. I dont know what to do with myself really. Working in general just sucks for me (which is really privileged for me to say because ive barely worked hard a day in my life and have had everything handed to me) and its not what i like about coding. I hate agile, never have anything to say in code reviews, and feel no satisfaction from my work.

What do I do? I want to become something more than what i am, learn new things, learn how to hack stuff together and make cool gadgets and programs, hone my skills to the limits of what i can do. Become one with the net and the machine. But not for capitalism, not for money, not to work a dull corpo job until my brain rots and my soul withers and i get replaced by an intern with an AI. But when i try its like my brain is in a fog and my motivation dwindles and i abandon everything to go back to cheap stimulation.

Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite