When I was 13 years old, I fell in love. I am still in love today.
I was 13 years old in 1981, and I was lucky enough to live in a school district that was sponsored by a wealthy foundation. The foundation put strict limits on class sizes, gave awards to great teachers, and generally tried to make our schools better. As part of that effort, they started a half day Gifted program for 7th and 8th graders.
It started when I was in 7th grade, and was quite selective. My standardized test scores were good, but my grades were, shall we say, erratic. I was rejected, and it stung pretty badly. By 8th grade, the powers that be decided that smart kids got bored in regular school and got bad grades. The way to fix that, they reasoned, was to give them more of a challenge.
(It didn't help my grades. We didn't know it back in the dark ages, but I had a raving case of ADHD.)
But, back to the love story.
We, the privileged few, had access to the very first computers in our school district. In our math classroom, there were three Apple 2 computers. And, we had an elective computer course with a class set of Commodore 64s. I fell immediately and irrevocably in love.
I learned a bit of Basic programming. I played with drawing lines using code, and thought those jagged lines were simply awesome. I wanted my own computer so badly. But, my parents never seemed to get the hint.
When I started college in the early 90's, I took Pascal as an elective (on a mainframe), and I still loved it. One of the guys in the computer lab told me I should switch my major to computer science, but to me, a computer was a fascinating toy - not a potential career.
Later, I had to take a couple of CS classes to graduate, and I was dating a CS major. He kept complaining about how difficult it was, and I thought he was nuts. I picked it up as a minor to show him he had a wussy major. (Mathematics was far superior, you see)
By the time I graduated, it was 1997, and if you had a pulse and could spell C++, you could get a great job. And, that's exactly what I did.
I am probably one of the luckiest people alive, because I get to do something I love every day - and get paid for it. Sure, I've gone through periods of burnout in my career, but it was never the programming part that caused it. It was the pressure of being responsible for the survival of an entire company. It was the pressure of trying to deliver some nonsense feature that the sales team had promised. It was backstabbing, cut-throat coworkers at a consulting company. In that job, the CEO came in 15 minutes after the World Trade Center had collapsed and told us our clients needed us to get back to work. (That job broke me and it took years to recover)
But even if my job sucks, I still love to program. I love the soothing pattern of red, green, refactor. (That is such a dopamine hit) And to be honest, I don't give a rip if AI takes all our jobs. (It won't) I'll program for fun, because that's what you do when you're in love.