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Whenever I've felt this way, it's been the environment rather than coding.
The first time, I was sick of Sydney traffic and so I left and worked in Canberra. There were a number of factors (the type of work, some people, etc) for leaving Canberra after 17 years and ended with a sea change (or quite close to one) living on the northern Gold Coast (south of Brisbane).
I'm not suggesting upending and moving cities, but have a look around you. Does the project interest you? Do you get on with your work mates? If not, a change of job might be a start.
// TODO: Insert something here Top ten reasons why I'm lazy
1.
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Don't know, but I wish I did!
I started a side project (non-commercial, to support people with a particular pastime) about 15 months ago. It was initially stop-start due to (real) work getting in the way. It reached a point where I released it as beta, but with minimal advertising and virtually no-one has used it yet - partly because it's missing some central functionality. I just can't build up the enthusiasm to complete testing of the part I coded in October. There's a lot of use-cases for a particular screen, and it will involve setting up quite a lot of test accounts etc, and I just can't get enthused by it. Until it's done, though, I can't move on to the next feature - after which it will be in a state where I can begin promoting it properly.
Partly I think it's fear - it has the potential to have a LOT of users and that could mean a LOT of support issues, at a time when I'm trying to wind down my coding activities.
I've found an amazing ability to procrastinate over the past few weeks; now I'm thinking I need to wait till after Christmas, then after New Year is "out of the way". Just to test a single web page. And it's just the two of us at home for Christmas, not like we're busy! 
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Would this be the telgraph marker posts project Derek ?
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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No - that's all complete. (Always tweaks and stuff to add, but it's live and well!)
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DerekT-P wrote: it has the potential to have a LOT of users and that could mean a LOT of support issues, at a time when I'm trying to wind down my coding activities.
If you don't want to support it, you can always open source it and offer it for free. Let the community support it.
Jeremy Falcon
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For sure, once it has some momentum I'm hoping we will have volunteers come forward to support (initially as admins but later as developers too), with the long term plan that it's supported from within the community.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: If you don't want to support it, you can always open source it and offer it for free. Let the community support it.
I find it interesting you'd suggest this and word it this way. This is no criticism...but hear me out.
When "open source" started making waves, I viewed is as kind of a "bad" thing - someone writes something, releases it to the world, and if there's problems, the wonderful thing is that you can go fix it yourself. At least that's how it had been (poorly) presented to me, and my stance against open source had often been, there's no accountability. Who in his right mind would want to commit himself to using a library when there's no-one to shout at when it's broken? Fix it myself? As a developer, I need to spend my own time writing my own software, not fixing other people's bugs.
I've come a long way, but (for example) when I look at the amount of NuGet packages out there, and how often things need to be updated...it sometimes makes me wonder if this approach is really the best.
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Yeah, that's a fair point. For the enterprise, I'll never use a package/software without a larger community support for that very reason. In this instance though, the alternative would be for the project to be abandoned it would seem. At least if it's open sources, perhaps someone else can take it and run with it. Never a one perfect solution to anything in tech though.
Jeremy Falcon
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first: get myself "off the hook" of feeling regret, remorse, etc.
second: meditate, and try to gain insight into the context in which i experience "loss of motivation" ...
third: try to accept that stress, (true for me, right now) health and age problems, may be limits it is a waste of time to try and push against.
and ... do other things i enjoy, see people who nourish me, design rings, write poetry and stories.
finally, i go on a diet of not reading the astute qa posts of MacCutchan, Deeming, Griff, and others ... so i stop comparing my current woeful (technical) state to their brilliance 
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
modified 19-Dec-22 8:45am.
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Do you mean MacCutchan ?
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Take a break - whether it be an hour or a couple weeks of vacation. If the lack of motivation continues, talk to someone (preferably a friend that has some understanding tech but isn't a coworker) and try to figure out what the underlying issues are, and then what might be done to help with the problem. Sometimes the lack of coding motivation is actually a bigger "what is the meaning of my life?" question!
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You have to be able to reward yourself. I rarely tackle anything that's "bigger" than a day. At the end of the day, I've created: a form; or a report; a file load; an extract ... something. So, each day I hit some sort of (in my mind) a (mini) "milestone" that tells me I accomplished something; something I can "point" to.
So, on a "bad" day, pick a more interesting "mini" thing to work on, and save the more gruntier things for the good days.
Even documentation can be fun if you make it a video project.
Music helps sometimes; other times it's noise: Buddha Bar.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I wish I had a good answer. After decades, it just comes and goes. If I get excited about the project I find myself motivated. But, if I get a hint of silliness, BS, etc. about the project, all that motivation goes out the window.
They say the only way to get over writers block is to just start writing. Even if it's crap because you don't feel like doing it. Just start doing it. Eventually you'll get back into it. Probably works the same with code.
But, all I know for me, is that with code... the industry is the same old thing. Nothing changes. So, bye bye novelty. Which is like the death of creativity.
Not sure if that was a useful reply or not...
Jeremy Falcon
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Stop thinking of it as a creative process. Much of the time, thank goodness, it's turning a series of logical process into usable code for a job/task/etc. It's that motivation to create the code not creativeness. The creativeness comes when it needs to come. It's not on a demand basis. Most times, necessity makes it needed, other times, efficiency and/or clarity makes it happen. Does this help? Been creating/writing/fixing code for almost 50 years.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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It's called burnout, and it's very damaging. The only remedy is to take some time off.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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Take lots of short breaks doing the exact opposite. Get outside, do something physical, etc. I work from home so this is easier. Stay away from the computer/phone on weekends and evenings. Also coding in a field that you are passionate about or working with people you care about is helpful. A body can only take so much sitting motionless and a brain can take only so much focus before they say, “no more”. You have to create the balance that prevents it.
Chris
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I generally go to the pub for a couple of pints. Lubricates the little grey cells, and often re-awakens the oomph needed for the project. A tough block may need an extra pint, but don't drive!
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My father used to say that lack of motivation means you don't have a big enough mortgage yet.
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I have this feeling with some regularity. In your case, I'd wonder what exactly you're working on or trying to.
I'm very familiar with the feeling of having bitten off more than I can chew, the dread of things getting gradually more complicated and fragile. Yes it is all a creative endeavor.
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Do anything but look at a monitor, maybe for a day, maybe for a week (and in that case take vacation in the Rockies). It usually means that either you've exhausted all feasible outcomes in your imagination or there are so many routes you can take that you need to mull over them away from the computer.
To me 90% of coding is actually on the whiteboard (the exception being looking through the 100+ functions and classes in an API)
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Retire. It's pretty great (except for the health care system in lolUSA#n).
Seriously, do more analysis on the lack of motivation. Is it really lack of motivation to code, or is it the particular project/environment?
In my example, I was at a place where they had these consultants who'd been around for years. Aggressively ignorant on doing things more right(ish)--hard coding magic values, the "new" stuff (MVC) was too hard and they didn't want to learn it, etc, etc, etc.
Couldn't get the boss to move on getting rid of these people, so I left. I can't coach people to be better who refuse to try to learn.
Fortunately for me, I had the resources to just retire, but short of that, I would've just found another place with more a competent staff. Wasn't demotivated to solve problems, just to be around solving them in a demonstrably terrible way.
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following is 90% rant
coding for a job, is a job
the do what you love, and you wont work a day, fallacy is that day to day work, does not cover the reason you might have first loved to program.
The "not for you", is either short term thinking.
35 and only in the last year diagnosed ADHD, learning and rethinking mind set around how I approached things, ie I am procrastinating vs PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) and yeah im mind wondering for hours on end, but once I finally kick into coding, the results are 2 or 3 steps iterated along, vs the times I have written first pass, then 3 hours of adjusting.
expand this out to days, weeks, months.
Is that healthy for all demands of work, no but also sometimes yes.
Depression and other mental exhasutions, hyper fixations, also do not help along with the creative load that coding requires.
Rubber duck debugging works for some. But explaing to a human, junior, kid, work collage how it works might be enough to get them fingers clicking.
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Talk to your boss and ask for a junior dev that you can mentor in this job. It will take longer but will provide you with some higher purpose as well as help you realize how much you've learned and have to offer.
If motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (per Daniel Pink) then you appear to have the Autonomy but are lacking the Mastery (this is not a challenge for you), and Purpose (the goal doesn't resonate for you).
Given that you've posted here, you're not a reclusive troglodyte (not that there's anything wrong with that) and you might enjoy bringing someone up to speed on something they couldn't do on their own.
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I totally get you.
I started coding around 11 - I’m now well north of 50 and I’ve probably thought about coding almost everyday since. It’s obsessed me, it’s a beautiful activity that is also hard, frustrating but rewarding.
I’ve often blocked for different reasons:-
- the requirements were vague
- deep down I didn’t think the feature was valuable (to the user)
- I didn’t know where to start
- I was burnt out (often because of the above times 100)
Depending on above:-
- go and do something else (cycling, swimming, etc)
- go speak to the (REAL) end user. It will either give you purpose or prove its not valuable
- write a failing test for the new feature. Then make it pass!
- write a todo list for the feature. Here’s the thing, though, make the next action really, really small so you could just do it will zero effort. Then make the next task that small. Keep going (read “getting things done” for more on this)
This should get you going. But remember to look after your mental health x
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