9 Years Into Career...Hate It but Resigned to Fact

This is a bit ranty, but I'm just trying to say you don't have to think you're stuck forever...

At age 40, I got my first coding job. I was over 200K in debt w/ no savings, no retirement, feeling quite trapped, and perpetually single. Now I'm 47, I'm debt free, have a 70k emergency fund, 114K in investments, and about 100 in retirement, I'm not feeling trapped, and I am dating a lot. Right now my biggest problem is figuring out what kind of woman is my type.

Here's the thing:

  • you may or may not be physically depressed in the ol' thinky organ, I can't speak to that, but wallowing in your own misery is a guaranteed way to continue feeling like crap
  • I've gone from hating my job to loving my job to feeling meh, and I've come to the conclusion that I'd simply rather not be working at all, so I merely try to treat my job like a job & don't look to it as the primary source of my satisfaction
  • My solution to feeling stuck at home was to a 100% WFH job, downsize my life to whatever I could fit into carryon luggage, and just start traveling (hello my Airbnb in Tunis, Tunisia)
  • Some of my problems stayed in my old life, and I worked on the one's that followed me (the next one I'm tackling is that I'm going to North Macedonia for three months to workout with a personal trainer & develop good exercise habits)
  • My entire strategy has been to get good enough at coding that I could WFH at a good enough salary, travel to cheaper locations so my money goes farther, start working out, and just date on Tinder for as long as it takes to find a good match (it's not a perfect plan, but it sure beats feeling sorry for myself at home)

Good luck. You can change your situation if you want to. All it takes is believe you can & then taking action.

/r/ExperiencedDevs Thread