Entirely possible. When I was about your age I wound up taking off and teaching English to little kids in Thailand. That was a great experience that involved a refreshing amount of time away from a computer.

I was able to pick up my career afterwards easily enough. I actually wound up working on education related software so my little teaching experience may have even helped.

The only lasting (sort of) negative was that I met so many people in Thailand who were living dramatically different lives that the idea of living out the rest of my days in a cubicle become less palatable.

I did the same at the same age as well, except I was teaching English in Japan. After only a few months of that, I had a burning desire to be back in a coding career, and to be as far away from eikaiwas as possible.

If you've never worked outside the tech industry, you would be amazed at how good we get it.

Lol. Very true. As much as I enjoyed teaching 6-8 year old and essentially playing games and singing songs all day having to clock in and out, a strict dress code and having to complete vast volumes of dead tree paperwork wasn't super fun. Especially when compared to software companies I have worked for. Flexible hours, free snacks, and wear whatever you want.

I've lost the starry-eyed excitement about most "new cool tech" long time ago. Pretty much before the time I entered the job market. But that only means I'm free to ignore all the hip trends and focus on building something I like, on solving some problems I feel need solving, on optimizing things around me. After all, isn't that the purpose of all those tools?

27 and I feel the same way, in that I don't feel much excitement around technology for technology's sake anymore. The latest version of macOS? Neat, but unlikely to be as "game changing" as Apple might have you believe.

The rate of change in some areas of technology can make you think that you're missing out on some kind of important development, however if things are changing that fast then perhaps nothing is really changing at all.

Mostly it's important that in whatever you're working on you're applying technology to a problem or area that you find interest in, otherwise the only "fun" can be found in the tech stack, which is not (in my not-too-humble opinion) a good place to find enjoyment. You can enjoy your tools, sure, but it shouldn't be the case that "We're using X, Y and Z" is more important than "to make Foo".

One thing I discovered some time ago is that the industry is basically running in circles. There isn't much new being really created; people keep reinventing the same solutions that have been made in the 70-s, only worse, and they still miss some. I think it's better to slow down a bit, brush up on some history, and then build stuff you want to build without worrying you're missing something important.

Do you think the adage "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it" holds true in the technology industry? I could cherry pick some examples just to start a flame war, for examples Node's "invention" of single-threaded event-based concurrency, but that feels a bit unfair ;)

Definitely. Think of every project that ends up having to encode a Turing-complete language inXML, essentially rediscovering Lisp...