I used to feel it more often.
Then I started to accomplish things that nobody else cared about or understood.
I realized that a lot of my sense of accomplishment came from sharing it with other people and seeing their reaction to me having done it. Or at the very least, seeing other people enjoy something I made.
There are a few rare moments where I'll be working on a particularly difficult problem and I'll come up with a solution that only I could have come up with, and it helps people, and even if they don't know what it took to do it, I'm still proud of what I did.
I feel accomplished then. But that's quite rare these days, especially since I no longer have a job, and don't yet have the health to get one.
The closest I've felt over the last year were an addition to the Lc0 chess engine that allowed me to make specific chess bots for Lichess, and a datapack for minecraft that makes the game as challenging as it was in the alpha/beta days.
I'm proud of both of those and have wanted both to exist for a while. And while barely anyone uses them or even cares about them, I still feel like I did something great, even if they're essentially useless in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe one day I'll get to work on a large influential project that I can actually finish and feel like I've actually done some hard but incredibly useful thing.
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