The short answer
You haven't lost your passion — you've let your skill outgrow your sense of purpose. The work still gets done, but it runs on habit now, not meaning. The fix isn't to feel more; it's to reconnect what you do to why it ever mattered to you in the first place.
Here is what is really going on. Research on professional identity shows that over time, people build a strong, stable sense of who they are at work — reliable, skilled, trusted. That stability is a real achievement. But it can crowd out the original reason you cared. The identity hardens into a role. The role starts to carry you, instead of you carrying it. You are still doing good work. You just forgot what the work was for.
Marcus Aurelius asked himself a sharp question: what is your profession? His answer wasn't the job title. It was to be good — to act with purpose, not just performance. That is the reframe here. You haven't become hollow. You have been running on the professional layer of yourself while the deeper layer — the one that first chose this path — has gone quiet. Those two layers need to talk again.
This week, try one small thing. Write down — not for anyone else, just for you — what you were trying to do for people when you first started. Not what you were trying to become. What you were trying to give. Then look at your work this week and find one moment, even a small one, where that gift is still present. You don't need to overhaul anything. You just need to see that the original fuel is still there, even if it's burning low.