You're 18 years older than me, but our paths are certainly similar. I also did a PhD because I liked the university lifestyle, didn't want a job, and wanted to

You're 18 years older than me, but our paths are certainly similar. I also did a PhD because I liked the university lifestyle, didn't want a job, and wanted to keep messing around with my honours project for a few more years. I think did a 20 month post-doc before working out that to get promotion I had to game the system in the same cynical way as everyone else was trying to do, so I quit and quickly failed at running my own startup. Now I'm writing software for someone else's startup. It's not what I'll do forever, but it's helping replace the academic programmer in me with a real software engineer, and keeping me interested as I learn new techniques.