If you are burned out, starting your own business or freelancing is not the answer. I’m 50, been developing professionally since I was 22 and as a hobbyist sin

If you are burned out, starting your own business or freelancing is not the answer. I’m 50, been developing professionally since I was 22 and as a hobbyist since I was 12. I have never felt burn out. I have always gone to work, given my employer the benefit of my skill set for 40 hours a week and not thought about work until the next business day. Until 2012, I was part time fitness instructor before and after work and on the weekends. It was never about the little money. It was an outlet, a commitment device to force me to exercise and a way to make friends and hang out with people. I stopped doing that in 2012 because I saw trying to juggle the commitment of teaching, taking my career more seriously and my new instant family - I got married that year and became a father to my two step sons was going to be to much. The next part of how I prevented burn out was never to really get on the hedonic treadmill. But we really got off of it after 2021. Thanks to a combination of the remote job at BigTech that fell into my lap and our younger son graduating in 2020, we were able to downsize, pay off some debt and I didn’t have to chase compensation to be happy. When Amazon started Amazoning in 2023, I had no stress. My bills were so low, I knew someone would hire me even if I did have to get a job as just an enterprise CRUD developer making much less than they were paying me. I also had decent savings. Not quite enough to be “in a position of f%%%% you” (https://youtu.be/I8kHzZykCI0?si=M_Mss0YIwziyuNTe https://youtu.be/I8kHzZykCI0?si=M_Mss0YIwziyuNTe). But enough not to stress. Context: I work in strategic cloud consulting focusing on application development. That was my job at AWS and now at a third party firm. There is a huge difference between strategic consulting where you talk to business stakeholders and bring your specialized knowledge to bring business value and staff augmentation where you just join a team as an easily replaced cog in the wheel. Do you have the soft skills for consulting? The network? The financial runway until your “consultancy” gets off the ground? When I had the choice to go independent after 2023, I thought that I really didn’t see myself wanting to deal with the stress. I like the same amount of money coming into my account whether I have a client or don’t have work to do. I like someone else going out and chasing clients and all of the other work that goes into running a business. When that job fell out from under me, I replied to another internal recruiter and got another full time job at another consulting company. Like the last one with benefits and PTO