I can relate to both comments. Covid really sapped the life out of me. Some relationships broke down during isolation, I lost friends, my fiancée left, I felt stuck in a job that I hated... The research into LLMs and diffusion models started to wake me up, but this superconductor research has, for some reason, really awoken something in me. I feel excited about the future– my future!– for the first time in a while. My zest for life is back in full force, I feel like myself again, and I've been very excitedly telling everyone I know!
You need to continue down this path and find something meaningful to you that you had a hand in making directly, not merely by association. It is related to the power process described in paragraphs 33-37 on https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Hang in there, that's how life is, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down but there will almost always be something interesting waiting for you in the future that makes you forget the miserable time that came before.
