Later on I met someone at a swing dance that I worked on a "side project" for a long time that became our current startup, which has been more meaningful to me than any job I've worked previously. (We're doing health and biotech and save people from horrible infections, but I'm a UX/full stack engineer).

I think that having had a tech job with tons of savings (and living in a cheap city in the South) really helped. Also, for many years I thought that a job was like air, and if you quit or lose your job you start suffocating, but the opposite has been true.