A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

Would you give me a small example of the kind of small irritations you are talking about here?

For example - I wrote a script that automatically rsyncs a bunch of folders I care about to one external HD, and then replicates the backup to a different external HD for backup purposes.

That sort of thing that would require you to run a bunch of commands and that you have to do from time to time. Automating it to a single script is cool.

I have a friend that wrote a bot to track the prices of stuff that he wants to buy and messages him on Telegram the current price and the min/max since it started running. Another fun little project.

Ah. This definitely sounds exciting and makes me think.

Not OP but when I was way younger I had some trouble learning programming languages. Following tutorials was boring and gave limited instructions. Someone on the internet gave the same piece of advice, i.e. to do something useful in your life.

I was at the time downloading a lot of porn pictures but the internet connection was slow and unreliable. And that's how I learned the Ruby programming language with its regexes, how to parse HTML with those regexes, parsing CLI arguments, and how to download files and put them in proper folders. It was the cleanest and best script/framework I have ever written.

The moral of the story is to find something to do, and it will show you a lot more.

Way back when, before it was very feasible for the general public to get internet access (in the Mosaic days, maybe 94 or 95), I found that I could access my local college library with my dial-up modem. Their system let you connect to the lending services of other university libraries. I found one (maybe Oregon State?) that let you access Gopher. That was pretty interesting in it's own right, but there was no ability to display images, and the functionality to download files was removed, so pornography was frustratingly hard to obtain. You could look at ascii art...

But you could dump uuencoded binary files to the screen. Capture it, read it from the text buffer, reformat it, decode it, and then... a glorious 25kb jpg of a scanned Playboy image. (In HAM mode on my Amiga.)

I spent so much time doing that stuff. Wasted time, in a sense, but it motivated me to learn much I might not otherwise have bothered to. The desire of a young man to see a woman in her glory should not be underestimated; societies suffer if they point that energy in the wrong direction.

As a 37-year old married man, the OP has probably acquired some other motivations, though.