Burning Man taught me an important lesson about expectations and satisfaction. You can't go to Burning Man and expect everybody else to give you a good time all the time, or you can end up bored, bummed out, and alone in a crowd. If you want a fun time, bring it with you. Don't spectate, participate.<p>Give yourself a small purpose and spend some of your work day on it. Make it something that feels rewarding. Remember, 1/3 of your life is spent at work.<p>Maybe you only want to focus on the technical. That doesn't mean only becoming an expert in one domain, but also pulling in knowledge from other domains for perspective and inspiration. Maybe you learn how the operating system works, or embedded design. Maybe learn how car ECUs work. Maybe in learning about cars you notice different companies make different designs, decisions, priorities, leading to different outcomes. Maybe you learn about NUMMI and the Toyota Production System. Then maybe you hear tech buzzwords that come from Toyota and find out how they're related. Then maybe you take all those non-technical ideas back into your technical work.<p>If you like to solve problems, you don't have to stop at technical ones. You can work on organizational problems, financial problems, logistical problems, communication problems, architectural problems. There's a million problems outside your domain of expertise, and you can learn about <i>all</i> of them. Your biggest problem is an overabundance of choice.<p>If you like to help people, you don't have to help just your immediate team. You can look at other teams and see if they need help. Maybe not even business help, but personal help. Maybe you'd like to join an employee resource group, or organize one; or a charity bake sale, or a hackathon. Or work on convincing your job to have a donation matching program, or finding a local charity to reinvest some percentage of profit into, or convincing execs to give everyone the day off on election day.