I fought this draining battle for about 15 years of a relatively typical IT career, from desktop support, to junior dev, too dev and all-hats, to application su

I fought this draining battle for about 15 years of a relatively typical IT career, from desktop support, to junior dev, too dev and all-hats, to application support, to QA (less stressful), to finally getting out of the game for the most part. Rarely did work not stress me out, aside from when I was starting out in desktop support roles, and maybe when I was trying out QA. I knew people that seemed to be made for it. They may not have liked it, but they managed to power through day after day of drudgery like it was nothing. They were productive, accomplished their workload, and did it consistently over and over. Sometimes I envied them and wished I could be like them. But in the end, I just am not. One of the biggest problems for me was that I rarely felt like I was working on anything worthwhile. It was either advertising to sell stuff, or tools to help people sell and ship stuff more efficiently, or number-crunching to track money, or various forms of CRUD to keep track of the cogs, and so on. And even when the work was interesting, it was still largely driven by deadlines and plans and getting X done in Y time units. Put these here frameworks together, work out most of the kinks, and ship, ship, ship! This was also kind of soul-crushing for me, because I like to get things "right", even if it means prototype after prototype that's discarded after a month or two of learning. In the end, I opted to minimalize my life and switch largely to supporting myself through barter and scavenging. Now much more of my time is under my control to do with as I please, and I try to make the most of it. For me, that means much more yoga and movement, and coding irregularly—when I am struck. I also feel much healthier, because I can sleep as much as I want and on whatever schedule I want.