Learning and creating things which people enjoy, regardless of the medium (design, code, writing). (It used to be publishing, then helping small startups grow,

Learning and creating things which people enjoy, regardless of the medium (design, code, writing). (It used to be publishing, then helping small startups grow, then privacy and now a cross section of mental health and tech.) Ideal: 1. Build a small thing solving an actual problem 2. Tell as story and teach people something using the thing I build: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/ https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/ Here's how not to approach this problem: I had spent ages thinking about this, or rather justifying my existing choices. I literally had SWOT analysis charts describing different paths I could take. The main issue was that I was approaching this from a purely rational point of view. But, I had to first learn about the emotional component of my decisions and biases. I grew up without financial security so that also tends to cloud my judgement (e.g. by comparing myself to people who work more stressful jobs). I was busy, overworked and really stressed then (but well paid!). Scaling down was very hard, in terms of self-judgement, but my health has improved drastically. I don't have time to write about this here, but in short: I think that many people who end up in engineering careers tend to get caught in a situation where they keep getting rewarded for solving problems, but eventually lose the context of what kinds of problems they're solving. For _example_: you start with your first SWE gig in an area you like, move to a tech lead/architect, then to a CTO working on a much meatier/"serious" problems. But as soon as you step back from the game progression graph (intentionally or not) you realise you lost the context, you don't give a shit about adtech or crypto, or marketing, or agile. You are really good at something you actually don't give a shit about. I don't think that SWEs are the only to end up with this issue, but that people who choose this line of work are more predisposed to getting a kick from chasing problems.