Don't be sad, there are plenty of opportunity still! And, there's much more easily found information and help :) A suggestion is to buy eg a MSP430 Launchpad (

Don't be sad, there are plenty of opportunity still! And, there's much more easily found information and help :) A suggestion is to buy eg a MSP430 Launchpad ($10) or STM8 development board (<$1 on Aliexpress) and write simple programs for those. Those cpus are very simple and great starting points.