There are options though. You can move towards a more teaching/"team lead"/"architect" role to get away from a lot of the day-to-day cycles. You can move to a

There are options though. You can move towards a more teaching/"team lead"/"architect" role to get away from a lot of the day-to-day cycles. You can move to a company where people actually sick around for 10+ years (Google, etc) and get very specific domain expertise, but maybe only in one company's systems. You can try to start your own projects/companies/platforms, but that is much more hit-or-miss than lower risk employment. An easy place to start is just walk around a town, find inefficient processes (lots of manual interventions or paperwork) and try to help them with computers. HN has a pretty distorted view of an overall life trajectory anyway. HN expects you to be come a millionaire by 22-25 and a billionaire by 28-30 or you're marked a failure. Most people in the real world can't imagine such a life and really don't care about "success" that much. But, with HN being so SF-focused, you need to be a millionaire to afford a stable place to live—and trying to "save up" doesn't work when you're competing against 1,000 new startup millionaires every year for the same limited housing supply. For the price of a studio condo in SF, you could buy a mansion in another city and probably reduce stress a lot by not needing to keep up with the social media jonses.