This perfectly encapsulates my feelings as well right now, even though I'm not as old. I wanted to make games, start a business, or make cool apps. Now I spend

This perfectly encapsulates my feelings as well right now, even though I'm not as old. I wanted to make games, start a business, or make cool apps. Now I spend 9 hours a day in an "enterprise" role resetting passwords and writing trivial backend code for third party apps. I'm a night owl, but I get up every day at the crack of dawn, and I'm too exhausted almost every evening to be social or work on side project ideas. I have a project at home that I really believe in, but with my exhaustion in the evenings and life's endless distractions filling my time in one way or another, it's been over a month since I really got in the "zone" for a few hours working on it. I went to a shitty school, so now I try to study algorithms and other fancy whiteboard interview-esque things I need to know (and didn't get a solid foundation on) if I ever want one of those fancier developer jobs at a company with 21st century environment, policies, etc. It gets so tiring to forgo time with family and friends to study in your spare time and write cover letters to places you'll never hear back from. And I live in a small town that I want to move from, how am I supposed to take enough time off unnoticed to do any meaningful amount of phone calls and in-person interviews? At the end of the day, it's easier to play a few games of Halo, go to bed, and say you'll get a little closer to somewhere you want to be tomorrow. And that's what I told my self a year ago. Will I be in the same situation next year? I've worked full time enough to see how easy it is to just give up on any dreams and settle for making the only focus of your life raising a few kids in a nice neighborhood house with white picket fence, and forgo efforts of reaching your full potential in favor of worrying about things like mowing the lawn and keeping beer in the fridge.