I started going to psychoanalysis and the analyst asked me: so why do you work in programming? I had to contemplate that for a long while. Answers that I came w

I started going to psychoanalysis and the analyst asked me: so why do you work in programming? I had to contemplate that for a long while. Answers that I came with were not at all what I thought. I had to really go back in memory to early days of my tech onboarding (teenage IRC years). I think it's a good exercise to go through. I think OP is one of the better examples of why it's a good idea. Because here is somebody hitting 40 and the life decision they are making is not whether to stay on the same path, also not contemplating what other things they could possibly do with the rest of their life (which statistically-speaking is probably another 40 years of fully conscious adult living) but to "see meaningful progression: in salary, in impact, in respect". So why are you in software?