Shortly after the first Internet bubble broke, I quit my horrible job and went to film school. IT was no longer fulfilling, or was at least a headache, and I n

Shortly after the first Internet bubble broke, I quit my horrible job and went to film school. IT was no longer fulfilling, or was at least a headache, and I needed to do something different. After film school, I needed money to pay for film school... so I tried to get back into IT. San Francisco was still in the doldrums, so it was stressful trying to find a job and I kept fouling up interviews. I eventually made my way down to LA and lucked into a good contract job there. But I found myself really beating myself into the ground - development was taking so much out of me, I couldn't manage to work on anything else, like screenplays... I was going through burnout but couldn't see it at the time. The compulsion to do a good job was taking over and having a great client didn't help. Fast forward a decade to now, and I am getting completely out of IT now. I've spent the last 4 years being professionally raped by a full blown sociopath and the reason I couldn't see it was because I was having to put all my chi / focus / energy / whatever into doing the work - it was now a serious compulsion instead of the enjoyable 'get paid for my hobby' thing my career started out as. And being manipulated didn't help... This process I now see had started 10 years ago but I, like always, pushed myself to keep on the same track instead of forcing myself to go through the stress of change. So I've lost a decade of my life here... I may be projecting, but "work, gym, sleep" sounds like you are starting to do what I did. Don't! It's a slippery slope. I wish to heck I'd reached out to HN like I see all these other people doing and asked for advice... If you still like web development, great, keep up to date at least out of pure interest, but it does sound like you need to do something different, if only for awhile. Changing gears will only help if you are getting habitual in your work life. Pick something interesting in web development, just one or two things, and become an expert at it - at some point you'll be able to get paid to do it no matter if you have a degree or not, just as long as you are prominent in some fashion in that particular ecosystem. Being a generalist like me is only good if you like working for small companies and doing everything only "good enough" versus being the "expert" in one thing for a company. Most companies only want square pegs they can hammer when they get past a certain size.... I'm guessing you are late 20s, early 30s? It is about now then that people start asking themselves "what do I want to really do when I'm 40ish?" I didn't listen to myself unfortunately - procrastination. So if so, you still have the time to make a mistake without too much consequence - one's life is like the software design cycle (sort of). If you think your life is like the waterfall model... every mistake in your 20s will haunt you forever (i.e. the women who have a checklist for Prince Charming). But life really is more like evolutionary design or maybe agile... try to view things like that.