I find myself "tuning out" anymore.....is the magic fading?

Early on in my audiophile journey in discover/learning phase, seeking out the knowledgeable and hearing as many systems as possible, exciting times, full of desire for all the things I didn't have, Then went into acquiring phase, thus, began the merry go round, discovering what I wanted out of my own system. There were many success and failures during this phase, luckily I was able to see the failures as learning experience, finding listening bliss was an elusive goal, but I couldn't give up, I could just as well call this the addiction phase. Over time I learned and acquired and/or modified equipment to my exact listening preferences to the point where I'm pretty much settled on a end game system, still making small, incremental changes not so much out of need, rather to maintain my interest in audiophile hobby. I"ve attained the sound quality I always dreamed of, the audiophile in me keeps the addiction going. It will likely take circumstances beyond my control to end my pursuit of change really for change sake.

The pendulum of suffering: when you get what you’re after, you’re bored. When you don’t get it, you’re frustrated. Either way, you lose. This is basic Schopenhauer, but it applies to the hobby of audio.

It's clear -- you're tired of chasing goals. That makes a lot of sense.

The path out of this is, as some here are saying, to shift to activities that don’t involve specific goals. Kieran Setiya writes about this in his recent book Midlife. Setiya, to crib from a recent piece on this, "argues that “atelic” activities — things we enjoy for their own sake — make us fulfilled. Too often, he states, we are consumed with “telic” activities: goal-driven projects that leave us unsatisfied in the present. (The terms derive from “telos,” the Greek word for “goal.”)

“What really matters is that some important things in your life, things you regard as sources of meaning, are atelic,” Setiya says. “Reading, or walking, or thinking about philosophy, or parenting, or spending time with your friends or family are activities that don’t have an endpoint built in. There isn’t a sense that in doing it you’re exhausting it, as if you could complete the project of hanging out with your friends.”

SOURCE: https://news.mit.edu/2017/how-philosophy-can-solve-your-midlife-crisis-1003

Have you listened to Yussef Kamaal Black Focus or Jaimie Branch Fly or Die?

It can be difficult to both realize and admit that our taste are changing, especially as we get older. Especially when we realize that the hobby or Pursuit that we have chased so diligently for years just no longer matters to us as much as it did. I think I'm at your stage as well and so far as I like still reading stereophile, but I have no urge to get any of this stuff that I ever see in there even if it's affordable.

And to illustrate this point I guess, a few months ago I rebuilt and refurbished my father-in-law's old pair of coral BX 200 speakers he had gotten when he was in Vietnam. They had been sitting in his garage for decades and he told me to take them and so I did and I restored the cabinets and the facing and replaced and upgraded the crossover and restored the tweeters as best I could and added dampening material and all that jazz and I've had them played in my system now for over a month with my normal reference 3A decapos sitting off to the side and I couldn't be happier.

So it's not a question of sound quality, it's just a question of listening.

My nightcap nearly every evening is playing a couple of albums, streaming or LPs…it doesn’t matter. It’s a wonderful way to relax and unwind. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember, I’d hate to lose that.