You might simply have reached the point in your life where you're not interested in sloughing around in the details any more. Perhaps you've matured and you want to look at the big picture and make a difference at that level.
I was a hands-on coder for about ten years and I just got tired of it. But I still liked IT and I got into management, then staff work and training. I was responsible for some major changes at the place I worked, such as implementing data security and teaching people how relational databases work. I was even the guy who started screaming about Y2K in 1988 so that the place (one of the world's largest IT shops) was completely remediated by 1998 without consultants, overtime, or triage!
As an analogy, forty years ago I really enjoyed taking carburetors apart and making them work better. Now I just want a car that does what it is supposed to do so I can concentrate on making the whole world work better.
IT is a great field, and it's taking over the world. It's hard to imagine that there isn't some major, important, exciting, challenging part of it that doesn't suit you. After all, wherever you go and whatever you do, you'll still have to be an IT expert to keep your blasted workstation running, unless you wind up in an ad agency or one of the other rare Mac shops.
It's very likely, especially from what you've said, that the place you work is bothering you more than the work itself. This could be true even if your heart really isn't in IT any more. You can get a job in another profession and still end up at a company that drives you nuts.
The encouragement you're getting from these other people to "follow your bliss" is good. But it's also good to hear from people who have tried it. It doesn't always work out. I've spent the last ten years regretting the fact that I walked away from a job that drove me nuts.
I had no idea what "nuts" is. There's abject I-can't-pay-the-mortgage-again poverty. There's having to live in a region so strange that you think you've been exiled to the Klingon homeworld. There's just getting to like a job and being laid off -- two or three times in a row. There's being discriminated against for something that people at the old place never even thought about. There's living with weather that makes you feel sick and slimy all the time. There's having to travel constantly in the Homeland Security Era.
The grass is not always greener. And sometimes what you've got is really the best there is.
If you get home from work feeling that amazingly bad, I wouldn't be surprised if there is more than one thing bothering you. Perhaps you should try to identify some additional stressors in your life and put them all in perspective, then work on the one(s) that offer the greatest potential for overall improvement. It might turn out that something else is bothering you more than the job, but you have a mental or emotional block about dealing with it. Family, love life, religion, friendships. Heck, some people are really bummed out over the state of the world today, can you believe that.
I'll close with my standard advice. If you don't have a dog, get one. If you do, spend more time with him/her. There's nothing on earth that can improve your life as much and as easily as a dog. There's a reason that humans began living with dogs before they even learned to live with other tribes of humans!
