Mostly guessing, but I think I'm like halfway between you and the commenter you're replying to. I've been where you are, not from the exact same path, but what you're feeling is familiar to me.
My two cents: I find joy doing challenging work on products that are useful to a bunch of people without needing to be "the next big thing". But what I find more joy in is my life outside of work, in spending time with and taking care of my extended family (including my close friends). The most success I've had with this so far has been at a big tech company. This is for a number of reasons: the product I work on is more likely to be useful to lots of people that way (because a lot of the marketing work has been done already), which also makes the work challenging (because scale brings challenges), and compensation and work-life balance are good so I can spend a lot of low-stress time focusing on family. I personally find the most joy working on things that mostly make money through charging people money for services because it feels like the most honest way for my salary to be paid, but I'm not sure how much that relates to this, it might just be a personal preference. Reading your post, I wondered whether you misinterpreted your big-tech coworkers. They might not have been checked out, they might have just been doing their work while having other interests that were more important to them. That is my interpretation of the people I work with (and of myself). I think it can look pretty lame to excited young people, but it's actually the opposite; what's lame is being super into working rather than other better things.
But as a follow-on, something I've been thinking about recently is whether I can take the useful skills I've built through a career in tech and apply them elsewhere, supported by the savings I've been able to build up. I'm not sure what that looks like, but being able to gather, process, analyze, and operationalize data seems important for lots of things, and that's something I know how to do (and I'm not alone here, software is largely about processing data). But I don't know what the most useful thing is to do with those skills; right now what seems important and in demand is epidemiology, but it's probably too late to become useful to this moment. Probably something in the broad sustainability space is more forward-looking. I'm still looking around.
I guess the two points I'm trying to make are: 1. You may be able to find joy by having more modest expectations, and 2. There may be other useful things to do with the skills you built, you should keep your eyes open for them.
My two cents: I find joy doing challenging work on products that are useful to a bunch of people without needing to be "the next big thing". But what I find more joy in is my life outside of work, in spending time with and taking care of my extended family (including my close friends). The most success I've had with this so far has been at a big tech company. This is for a number of reasons: the product I work on is more likely to be useful to lots of people that way (because a lot of the marketing work has been done already), which also makes the work challenging (because scale brings challenges), and compensation and work-life balance are good so I can spend a lot of low-stress time focusing on family. I personally find the most joy working on things that mostly make money through charging people money for services because it feels like the most honest way for my salary to be paid, but I'm not sure how much that relates to this, it might just be a personal preference. Reading your post, I wondered whether you misinterpreted your big-tech coworkers. They might not have been checked out, they might have just been doing their work while having other interests that were more important to them. That is my interpretation of the people I work with (and of myself). I think it can look pretty lame to excited young people, but it's actually the opposite; what's lame is being super into working rather than other better things.
But as a follow-on, something I've been thinking about recently is whether I can take the useful skills I've built through a career in tech and apply them elsewhere, supported by the savings I've been able to build up. I'm not sure what that looks like, but being able to gather, process, analyze, and operationalize data seems important for lots of things, and that's something I know how to do (and I'm not alone here, software is largely about processing data). But I don't know what the most useful thing is to do with those skills; right now what seems important and in demand is epidemiology, but it's probably too late to become useful to this moment. Probably something in the broad sustainability space is more forward-looking. I'm still looking around.
I guess the two points I'm trying to make are: 1. You may be able to find joy by having more modest expectations, and 2. There may be other useful things to do with the skills you built, you should keep your eyes open for them.
Hope this helps a bit, cheers!