Working on someone else's ideas is never going to be as much fun as working on your own. There also is the perspective of maturity and growing older, changing

Working on someone else's ideas is never going to be as much fun as working on your own. There also is the perspective of maturity and growing older, changing jobs a few times where you start to see the same patterns at different organizations, similar personalities, similar systems, and industry trends that start repeating. Maybe you get disillusioned, but maybe you realize you love the craft of creating things and solving problems and its nice to be paid really well to do that. And maybe, like me, you want to go build your own thing but never get anything off the ground. Family, career, hobbies, etc. are important. Has external motivation (a company asking you to do X) conditioned me too much to be able to define a my own path forward? Not sure how to get out of that without some financial independence type of windfall.