Wow, are you me? When people ask me if I feel like programming is what I want to do the rest of my life I often reply with "No, I think one day I'll just drop it all and move on the country side". Nice to know I am not the only one :)

There are billions are people trying to get out of self sufficiency farming because it's suffering.

To make it bearable you need tons capital intensive machinery, and extensive skills. You have to do it on industrial scale.

Farming is not such fun, but rural living is pretty cool.

Keep in mind that companies are happy to pay you more than twice as much to do that than they'd pay somebody to do anything else. Than means you can spend less than half your life staring at that screen each year and still come out ahead compared to the average joe.

Save your money and you can take 6 months vacation each year, or a 2 year sabbatical every 4. Certainly that would improve your quality of life a bit, no?

Compare to "self-sufficiency farming" where instead of a screen, you're staring at potato plants all day every day. Plants, I might add, that don't give you the opportunity to take half the year off each year and the money to travel the world while doing so. To an outsider, it would seem that trading one for the other is kind of a silly idea. At least I'm sure you could find no shortage of farm hands who would happily hold on to your seat in front of that screen if you wanted to switch places.

Don't mean to sound condescending or anything. It's just I know a lot of people that LOVED start ups post-college and are now feeling the exact same way as you, and kind of forget that there's super cushy jobs out there without a lot of the startup stupidity.

That's why they are always hiring and firing :)

This worries me, happens to me lately also. It's probably a pattern that our brain learns from programming, to optimise and simplify everything and actually ignore what does not matter. Probably this translates into our behaviour outside work, where your socialisation skills suffer. What I noticed is that the brain can be resurrected (partially) by exercising. Perhaps we could use the experience of more socialising jobs every once in a while but ... we have our golden-handcuffs.

i think the same!

> Finding a job where I'm above of all that madness would be great [...]

I think the problem is your assuming that programming is limited to cranking out dynamic websites ("web applications" they call them nowadays) all day. There are plenty of problems out there -- even internal ones! IT tools that are missing -- that need solving that don't even come close to have web interface or where web interface is only a superficial part.

I spend part of my free time learning math, distributed systems, and other subjects in hopes of moving to another area one day.

I was going to reply to the parent, but I couldn't have said it better myself. I am not unhappy, but the constant switch from framework to framework that my coworkers push has jaded me. Maybe I am just getting too old (relative to them)

I too dream of homesteading, but I don't think it is a valid option.

This! I tend to think the same way. I can drain my brain so much that by 5pm I'll be a ghost. I've found helpful to divide my tasks into smaller composable units and if I can't reach that point then I try to think that I'm doing something wrong and I'll poke someone else in the team looking for some help. It's hard when you don't have anyone you can talk to.

My biggest challenge is stop thinking about work. It's not always like that but when it gets rainy and dark and there is something interesting going on at work I can get 100% absorbed. Not healthy at all but it's hard to overcome it. I'll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something I'm working on. It's kind of scary but I also enjoy it. Do you feel like that at all?

Socializing is also really helpful for me, but it's hard to make quality friends - I am an immigrant which doesn't help at all.

and the follow-up

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/09/01/TheLurn.html