gomibako

I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly

Counterpoint here, i spent some years trying to get away from the bar and into tech, and eventually gave up as I both didn't enjoy it and still felt like a failure after 4-5 years of self teaching. I can blame that partially to not having a mentor or much of a community as you say, but also to mostly just getting remote gigs via upwork where I was supposed to churn out a bunch of work without guidance (very anxiety inducing for a noob), and to my background in arts which put a constant nagging voice in my mind that asked me is this bullshit really what you want to do?

I went back to bartending where I've been quite happy ever since even if poor - it also gives an outlet to my artistic side, as you're partially a performer behind the bar. After a while i started getting more and more into digital art tho and as i turned 40, i realise i need to make that my main thing and eventually leave the bar behind. It's a tougher jump as there's not nearly as much work as in tech, but I'll have to make it. Knowing how to code is a big advantage though (mostly doing VR and animation in Unreal Engine these days) and when it's just one part of the job i actually find it enjoyable :D

The other fun things to do is to play the 45 rpm records (usually the 7 inch ones) at 33 and rediscover chopped and screwed music

Read "why are artists poor?" By Hans Abbing, who is an artist and an economist himself. It's more focused on the economy of what we call the contemporary art market but it does spend time contrasting it with the economy of """lower""" forms of art (recorded music, commercial illustration etc)