Does not help when the answer is "to not starve and not lose your house for missing three mortgage payments, stupid" though.

I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.

There is a middle ground where you’re not at risk of missing next month’s mortgage payment, but downshifting or changing careers might mean you take a lot longer to reach retirement (or “financial independence” if you don’t like the word retirement).

There absolutely is this middle ground, agreed. But personally, I've been very stupid with money. I let my passion for technology and the illusion that I will always be in high demand get the better of me and I am currently paying heavy interest, so to speak, in ruined health, both physical and mental, and having to look for a job in tough market with age discrimination sprinkled on top.

Oh well.

That's rough. Hope you find the job you need soon.

I wish money management was taught in schools. My family didn't have money so how were they supposed to teach me about compound interests. And those growing up in money may not realize its value...

Thanks. I wish would-be parents had psychological evaluation at least. My mother and father were 95% inept to be parents. They did the very bare minimum and then one of them died and the other was, shall we put it softly, just a drag for 22 years until she died less than two months ago as well.

Pain inside does make one do stupid crap. Definitely applies to me. Now I am trying to heal and be more rational with money at least. The rest will follow more or less automatically; removing stress is itself healing.

Let me try to be more clear, I don't half ass. I just take a 10 minute walk when I get stressed. I take 10 minutes to think through something without touching my keyboard even though the keyboard monitor is monitoring. Once I'm past 8 and a half hours I turn off my computer almost regardless of the circumstances. In certain emergencies I won't, but most of the time that meeting actually is not more important than eating dinner with my family and getting bullet points the next morning.

I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.

If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.

>... keyboard monitor is monitoring

I would say get out as fast as possible.

That would be part of the medium term plan. Have to hang on as long as I can for now though.

I've learnt this lesson the hard way recently.

I dislike my projects failing and missing deadlines. So in addition to pushing back against unrealistic expectations, I caught other people's dropped balls and filled the gaps of un-backfilled roles. On top of that when there was down times, instead of resting, I took on fun side projects that had higher impact for my employer than the work actually assigned to me.

They got me with praise and guilt tripping, until last year, all the little "do this one more thing", "can you ship it 1 day earlier" had turned into me delivering by myself as much work as the rest of my team on ~20h weeks (because the other 20h I was unable to function due to burnout). We're siloed into different projects so I never realized I was doing 5x the work rather than 20% extra until a new reporting tool visible to each other was used...

So this year, I'm not doing side projects, fixing other people's messes or doing other people's work. I've told my manager and he's bringing an extra person to the team. I'll do my work and I'll do it well but I'm a contractor paid half what my FTE counterparts are, and it's not like there is a path to promotion so I'm not going to compromise my health anymore to do the work of 4 extra people for free. Not in any future job.

Point is, check your workload and if you're doing more than what you're paid for: that's where you can take back the time to find meaning in different things. It's not slacking if you're delivering a day's worth of work in a day, no matter how much HR BS tries to guilt trip you into thinking that.