Sorry to hear you're dealing with this. I was there for 6 years while working for two of the most toxic and manipulative managers who took advantage of my natural want of helping when I can (not for attention or reward. I really don't know why, but it's kind of a burden). I wasn't myself for those years and close friends took notice, but that all fortunately changed when they laid me off in the fall and I couldn't be happier. It's taking time, but with each day my old self is returning and with that the motivation to create again.
One thing that's helped in terms of coming up with ideas, for projects that are more on the digital art side, has been thinking about how the realm of comedic media is stale. From there, what could I make with my current skillset and that would make friends, others, and myself legit laugh at and engage with. Through dwelling I came up with a 3d mocapped Joe Biden avatar whose voice was cloned using a speech synthesis library along with a cloned lexicon using gpt2. Had it streaming on Twitch and connected the chat api as input for it to respond to, enabling users to interact with it. Some of the stuff it spit out was pretty wild.
In terms of ideas for utility projects, I've found it helps to think about something you enjoy using in your hobbies, but that you wish it was improved upon. Personally, and oddly enough, I enjoy learning about and observing candle chart technical indicators (not the line/triangle drawing type of thing. Just isn't my thing and can easily lead to confirmation bias), but use apps that either charge a high premium, invade user privacy, crap UI, cap number of indicators used, and/or don't offer much in terms of charting options. So I decided to build my own app that answers those issues and am currently getting close to releasing... somewhat lol.
Just think about what was taken from you during those troubled times, whether it was sense of humor, joy, etc, and think of how to get back what was robbed of you. Cliche to say, but it takes small steps at first, and from there the ideas/execution will snowball.
One thing that's helped in terms of coming up with ideas, for projects that are more on the digital art side, has been thinking about how the realm of comedic media is stale. From there, what could I make with my current skillset and that would make friends, others, and myself legit laugh at and engage with. Through dwelling I came up with a 3d mocapped Joe Biden avatar whose voice was cloned using a speech synthesis library along with a cloned lexicon using gpt2. Had it streaming on Twitch and connected the chat api as input for it to respond to, enabling users to interact with it. Some of the stuff it spit out was pretty wild.
In terms of ideas for utility projects, I've found it helps to think about something you enjoy using in your hobbies, but that you wish it was improved upon. Personally, and oddly enough, I enjoy learning about and observing candle chart technical indicators (not the line/triangle drawing type of thing. Just isn't my thing and can easily lead to confirmation bias), but use apps that either charge a high premium, invade user privacy, crap UI, cap number of indicators used, and/or don't offer much in terms of charting options. So I decided to build my own app that answers those issues and am currently getting close to releasing... somewhat lol.
Just think about what was taken from you during those troubled times, whether it was sense of humor, joy, etc, and think of how to get back what was robbed of you. Cliche to say, but it takes small steps at first, and from there the ideas/execution will snowball.