There are lots of great comments on this page. I'll offer something different, which is a critique on this section of your post: > Efforts taken at this point

There are lots of great comments on this page. I'll offer something different, which is a critique on this section of your post: > Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile, whether that means going back to school or picking up a new skill; I would be in competition with others who've been practicing their trade for many years. Emphasis mine. This is bullshit. In three major ways. First, just because someone has been doing something a while, doesn't mean they're very good at it. Just because someone started 10 years ago, doesn't mean another person can't surpass them within a single year. Practice does not make perfect (it does usually make good enough though). Second, I'm going to assume you kind of sort of like programming, but if you don't then I'll suggest that as a new general skill for you to pick up. Every year job-n00bs graduate with a CS degree and yes, some of them do in fact get a job programming--even some of the incompetent or just somewhat-worse-than-mediocre graduates. Yeah, if you pick up programming, you'll be "competing" with them for the basic jobs. Yeah, some companies have age bias, a lot don't. And maybe this year you don't get a job you want. So focus on improving the skill that company wanted over the course of the following year (a great thing about programming is that "on-the-job" is not the only way to improve your skill), and when you try again, you're still in competition with a fresh crop of n00bs, but now you have a year of practice on them. Some people are always going to be ahead of you. Big deal, the demand isn't exactly drying up. Third, there are plenty of fields that are dying for new blood. It doesn't matter if it's inexperienced blood, that can usually be fixed. And there are who knows how many unknown frontiers of thought and work left to explore. If you're really worried about competing with people who have decades of practice and experience, then find something that no one on Earth has been practicing for "many years", and do that.