It's pretty common for gifted kids to wind up with a slew of issues when they get older. It's also pretty well known that "high achievers" often have a lot of l

It's pretty common for gifted kids to wind up with a slew of issues when they get older. It's also pretty well known that "high achievers" often have a lot of leg ups that other people don't have -- or, stated another way, that poverty, child abuse, and other social determinants objectively hold back many very talented people. I'm sorry that you've gone through this, but also know that you are not alone. One of the themes from "Hamilton" is "who tells your story?" This sparked a surprising amount of reflection and struggle for me, that ended with me realizing that, like most people, nobody will tell my story. Our lives are ultimately ephemeral, and I'm ok with that. In a lot of ways, it's a total relief to completely let go of the notion of a "legacy" and instead focus on doing things for my own enjoyment. So, if I'm not worrying about my legacy, then I'm also not worrying about my success and potential. I need to make enough money to live and to support things that I enjoy, but I don't really need more than that. Nobody needs to make 500k/yr. And, frankly, very few people need to make 150k/yr. You can live off less, and the lower paying jobs are often the ones that have higher impact or more interesting work or better work/life balance. There are TONS of non-profits, academic labs, and governments that would kill for a "mediocre" software developer to solve some pretty basic problems for them. As fancy as blockchain, VR, AI, whatever is, it's really not what's impacting people's lives today. I literally had a phone call at work today about setting up a git repo for a researcher so they could track changes to their analysis code. They literally don't know how to do that, and I added value to their lives and to this research project by clicking a button in GitHub. I'll go further out on a limb, and say that creating a git repo impacted their lives more than Tesla's self-driving cars or Apple's VR headset or Facebook's metaverse will for years to come. And they were actually thankful for my help... which is a relief from some of the toxic startup environments I've worked in before. I guess, to borrow your metaphor, how do you know your winning lottery ticket was for something you even wanted? Maybe you won a lifetime supply of lutefisk, and you let the ticket melt away. But who cares? Stop thinking about the lutefisk, and instead go dancing in the rain. There's so many cool things out in the world.