used to enjoy, now seems empty & wasteful, what causes i

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You know, it's funny how something you used to enjoy filling time with can come to seem empty and wasteful.

What causes that kind of thing?

I would imagine this stems from having exhausted the learning/entertainment value of a given activity or subject. I believe it's a good thing to move on and experience new things.
I've had several interests that eventually gave way to newer ones.

I just get bored with it over a period of time... or I learn exactly what I want to know and am ready to move on to the next thing and the new thing replaces the last... it's like it never existed and I could just care less.

Very clairvoyant, I thought it, scrolled down, and there it was.
This happens throughout life, it can be a growing experience or an evasive maneuver attempt.
If the latter applies, it will later re-apply, find it, face it, fix it. I have had this feeling of burn-out with people, places and things. Once I actually gave up the career dream job with no more excuse other than "I lost my give a s**t". There was no other way to put it, and I still cannot come up with a better term. As it turns out, it was the single largest growth spurt I've yet to experience in four decades. Just be honest with yourself and try not to leave anything in bad terms, and grow.

very well put.

Yup, that.. or repeatedly failing at something despite putting massive amounts of time and effort into it. When I'm obsessed with something, and do nothing but that particular something for over a year, and don't have anything to show for it.. I start to get discouraged.

What sucks is when it's burnout with people, and you are one of those people.

Depression does that to me. Coffee sometimes helps me feel more motivated with interests.

I think it's just a natural side-effect of having special interests, for some of us. I obsess about something till I'm sick of it, then move on to something else. For example, after being addicted to one video game or other over the years, I now find that I'm sick of them and feel they're a huge waste of my time. I can't even get interested in new ones any more. Unfortunately, that's made it much harder for me to make friends with other IT Geeks I meet through work, 'cause that's the biggest recreational thing they've all got in common.

Yet, even when I'm afraid I'll burn out on a special interest, and don't want to, it's really hard to take a break from it while I'm still interested in it. A one-track mind!

Perhaps the novelty just wears off on said things.

In economics, it's called the Law of Diminishing Returns.

I call it "binge thinking" but it can extend to "binge doing" or "binge watching", "reading", "binge ________". When I binge I experience a fatigue afterwards. Some binges are longer than others, I can binge for many months before getting tired of something.