My (unsolicited) advice would be, go and find one of those jobs that you idealise from a few decades ago. They still exist, just where they always were, in academia. Of course, it's not all playing, but if you want your job to revolve around programming things that nobody has programmed before, that's the place to be.

Have a look at getting into a PhD programme in Computer Science, Computational Engineering or something even more abstract like Computation Number Theory.