I have been writing software for six years. I started at ten, during a lockdown, because there was nothing else to do and a screen was the only window that opened onto something larger than my room. Now I am seventeen, and the window feels smaller than the room.
I do not know when it happened. There was no single moment. No dramatic failure, no burnout episode, no crisis. Just a slow, quiet dimming. The terminal is open. The code is there. I can still write it. I just do not feel anything when I do.
Tired is not the right word, though it is the one I keep using. Tired implies rest as a remedy. Sleep more, take a week off, come back refreshed. I have tried that. The feeling remains. It is closer to something I do not have a clean English word for. In Turkish there is a phrase, "canım sıkılıyor," which translates poorly as "I am bored" but actually means something between restlessness and suffocation. The soul is being squeezed. That is nearer to it.
I have shipped more projects than I can list from memory, and there is always another one waiting behind the current one. I am seventeen years old, and I feel old. Not wise-old. Just worn. The kind of old that comes from doing one thing for a third of your life before most people have started doing anything at all.
Lately I have been thinking about handing the work over to someone else. Not dramatically. Not publicly. Just finding someone competent, giving them the keys, and stepping back far enough that the projects carry on without me inside them.
The thought scares me and excites me in equal measure, which is probably a sign that it deserves serious consideration.
What would I do? The list assembles itself faster than I expected. Literature. Philosophy. Linguistics. Mathematics, the kind done with paper and a pencil, not a compiler. Poetry. Novels. Not reading them for productivity, but reading them for the sake of the sentence, the paragraph, the argument. Learning a third language. Travelling without a laptop. Playing sport without checking my phone at half-time. Getting a pet. Spending an afternoon with my family where I am actually present, not half-present with the other half reviewing a pull request in my head.
Art. Hobbies. People. Love.
The fact that I can list these things so quickly, and that none of them involve a screen, tells me something I have been avoiding hearing.
I will probably study computer science at university next year. Not because I am passionate about it right now, but because six years of work have accumulated into something, and abandoning it entirely would feel like waste. A degree formalises what I already know. A master's in machine learning extends it into territory I have not yet explored. It is a rational plan. It makes sense on paper.
But I notice that the arguments I make for it are all negative. Not waste. Not pointless. Not throwing it away. I am not running toward something. I am trying not to run away from something.
That is a different kind of motivation, and I am not sure it holds.
I do not have a resolution for this. If I did, it would not be honest. The people who write about burnout always seem to arrive at a tidy conclusion. They took a sabbatical, rediscovered their purpose, came back stronger. I do not think that is what is happening here. This is not burnout. Burnout is a response to overwork. This might be something quieter: the realisation that the thing you built your identity around is not the thing you want your identity to be.
I started coding because I was eleven and curious. I kept coding because I was good at it, and being good at something when you are young earns you a kind of attention that is difficult to let go of. Somewhere along the way, "Umut who codes" became "Umut the developer," and the developer became the whole person. Which is a lot to ask of a single activity, especially one you chose before you were old enough to understand what choosing meant.
I am not quitting. I do not think I am capable of quitting even if I wanted to. The instinct to build is still there, underneath the fatigue, like a pilot light that has not gone out. But the flame is low, and feeding it more of the same fuel is not going to raise it.
What I need, I think, is not rest but range. Not a break from work, but a wider life to bring back to it. The best code I have ever written came after reading something that had nothing to do with code. The best technical decisions I have made came from thinking about problems that were not technical problems. Narrowness is what is suffocating me, not the work itself.
Six years. A third of my life. Enough to know what I am capable of. Not yet enough to know what I want.
I suppose that is what the next six are for.