Not quite the same situation and probably not reproducible, but maybe I can give you a glimmer of hope: Throughout the 2000s I was in a unrewarding PHP-coding

Not quite the same situation and probably not reproducible, but maybe I can give you a glimmer of hope: Throughout the 2000s I was in a unrewarding PHP-coding job with a company that was going nowhere and I (extremely foolishly) stuck around out of loyalty to my team, only to be laid off around the beginning of the 2008 crash. I was 33 and felt tied down, stuck in a smallish city with no real tech industry and a bunch of debt. (I need to interject here that I'm something of a long-time Apple stan, so this might seem unrelatable if you're not). I was able to find a job with a much better company locally, but it wasn't the most engaging work, and my boss managed my team more like a McDonald's shift than a tech company. I had done a bit of Mac programming on a hobby project in the late 2000s, and some of that turned out to be applicable to iPhone programming, so I picked some of that up on the side, both some very basic apps and a couple of contract gigs doing iPhone development that in retrospect I wasn't remotely qualified for. The company I was working for had a product that was a natural fit for the iPhone and moreso the iPad, so I was able to get them to send me to WWDC in 2010, which as a long-time Apple stan was a bit of a dream come true for me. Later in 2010 I was contacted out of the blue by a company looking to hire a full-time iOS developer to take over for the contractor that had built the iPhone part of their product. I worked there for a few years through an acquisition (that paid off a lot of my debt) and then switched jobs a couple of times. Anyway, I'm now nearing 50, earning 3–4 times what I was when I got laid off, working remotely from a place I still really like, and (mostly) really enjoy the tech stack that I get to work with. Again, with the iPhone being the most successful product in history, this may or may not be replicable. I don't know that I have any super clear takeaways, but: 1. Don't lose hope, because while that may be productive for specific initiatives, it's almost never productive for life in general. 2. If you have the free time/energy, I would recommend playing around with a few different kinds of tech that you genuinely enjoy, either as a user or as a developer (For example I was also playing around with a Mac app project, a Ruby/rails project, and a micromobility project that ended up not leading to paying work). 3. If you feel like you're starting from a place of very little specific knowledge of anything, you might consider looking more at new technologies where everyone else is also starting from very little specific knowledge.