I don't know. I just lost my job and I have fewer savings than I wanted (six months just about), and I am feeling phenomenal. I started finally working on my own long-neglected passion projects, and I feel excited about coding again. Started drinking way less, stopped stress-eating, etc.

Granted I was planning on doing this anyway (just a bit ahead of schedule for me), I needed to be ejected from the hamster wheel by force to acknowledge that it was the job and not me.

Then next year I will start looking again, but I will be way more picky. A job that you hate can wreck you.

If you're anything like me, this will have enduring positive benefits on both your personal happiness and lifetime earnings.

A sabbatical is an investment in yourself, and by definition not a cheap one. Although depending on who you are and what you want to do with it, it doesn't have to come 100% out of one's own pocket.

A great sabbatical would be teaching children, or underrepresented adults. That will affray expenses, and gets you in on a group buy for health insurance, for those of us stuck with that problem.

Still, it's not available to everyone, I don't want to dismiss that. I'd like to see it possible for more of us. This is not an industry which is short of wealth, and a nonprofit which helps match mid-career software people with sabbatical opportunities, scholarships, and so on, would be a welcome addition to the landscape.