This resonates with me, I lost my job just before my forties. It was in a pretty specialized field using a proprietary language not known outside of it. I was a

This resonates with me, I lost my job just before my forties. It was in a pretty specialized field using a proprietary language not known outside of it. I was also in a non native country. While I could have probably found another job in the same field using the same skills, it would most definitely involve moving to another country and I was really settled where I was. I was also having visions of slowly becoming too specialized and ending up in a basement somewhere looking after a legacy system. I'd been working on an OSX app as a side project for fun and decided to develop that, if only to add an other skill while I still looked for another job. After a little interest this developed into an iOS app and that started selling a few units a week, but nowhere near enough to pay the bills. (It still brings me in beer money every month) All the time I was looking for another job, slowly running out of money, this was for 4 years. I'm not university trained, had worked with this language no knew about for near twenty years, now over 40, in a country where I wasn't completely fluent in the language and getting interviews was hard, really hard. Of the interviews I did get, one interviewer told me the app I had written wasn't technically possible, another told me I'd never keep up with younger kids. I had just about run out of money when I finally landed an interview at a company looking to develop an iOS app and also in a similar field to what I worked in before, luckily they needed someone right away and I aced the interview. I've been there 3 years now maing a great impact on their existing app, and now after developing and proposing a new app to the company, I now work on that. I feel my employment prospects are in a much better place for the future, with a successful app under my belt in an environment people actually know about. It was tough though, just sorting out the mess I had got into with surviving on my last pennies and getting into a pretty bad state psychologically is something I'm still dealing with.