Feels familiar. It's this rocket launch in super slow motion, the uphill battle of following the standard script. Finish school, finish the university, get a

Feels familiar. It's this rocket launch in super slow motion, the uphill battle of following the standard script. Finish school, finish the university, get a job, work on the PhD, survive the lawsuit vs conscription army, finish the PhD, get a better job... And suddenly you are in orbit. The last stage falls away, and there is freefall. There is no next step, nothing left to do, no battles left to fight. Feels awesome, but gets old really fast. I lasted up there for about a year before hopping on a random plane and spending a couple months in South America, then slowly figuring out the things that are worth doing and things that aren't worth doing. 5 days a week job is not worth doing, it eats away your sanity. 3 days a week leaves much more time to work for projects of your own (or to come up with them). Projects are worth doing, you never guess in advance how they would play out, and the process is fun. So, step one is to derail the current routine and get some thinking space outside it's constraints. Step two is to figure out what you like to do and how to be able to do it. Not sure how well that would work for you - Russia is a cheap place to live and most existential stuff is free, so my situation is quite a bit privileged compared to what i heard about USA.