After serving as founder, co-founder, or early equity hire for a few startups over the years, I now work a straight job at a stable, decades-old company, doing

After serving as founder, co-founder, or early equity hire for a few startups over the years, I now work a straight job at a stable, decades-old company, doing mainly programming and IT stuff. There are nice things about it. It's great to be able to completely push work out of my mind. Barring extreme emergency, I refuse to even think about work when off the clock--that's what work hours are for. In the shower, I think about how the hot water feels on my neck. In my spare time, I make things that I am utterly not good at making, and never will be (e.g., homemade furniture). I don't mentally evaluate every dinner out with my wife against what I could be doing with that time. That certainly isn't how it was when I was running my own startups. A relatively generous and reliable salary is also a boon, especially as I plow through my fourth decade of life and start doing things like buying a house and producing offspring. Having said all that, I'm almost certain to try another startup (or two? three?) in the future. But it is refreshing to take a decade (or two? three?) and focus on other things.