I'm a mechanical engineer, not software, but a few years back I was feeling pretty burnt out from a high stress job so I took a much easier though less fulfilli

I'm a mechanical engineer, not software, but a few years back I was feeling pretty burnt out from a high stress job so I took a much easier though less fulfilling gig with the plan to get back to interesting stuff when I'd recovered from the burnout. It didn't work out great. Yeah the job was a lot less stressful and I liked my new coworkers, but job difficulty was only one factor in my burnout and it took me a lot longer to recover than I'd expected, and meanwhile there were new sources of stress. My pay wasn't bad for what I was doing but it was still objectively low compared to what I needed to maintain my standard of living and I definitely wasn't padding my saving account. A lot of stress inducing parts of the job like the commute don't scale with pay; I could put up with things like this when I was making good money and working on interesting projects, but I don't want to sit in traffic for an hour just to sit in an office and be bored. Even though the stakes were lower, I was still heavily involved in a lot of projects and my coworkers depended on me, so even after I was ready to go back into "real" engineering, I still dragged my feat for a while as it never really felt like the right time. Looking back on it, I'd much rather have just taken 6 months off from working entirely and either worked on personal projects or travelled than wind up spending about 3 years spinning my wheels with little to show for it.