I feel like I'm similar. In the past couple of years, I've tackled most of the stuff on your list (I didn't touch compiler construction, sound synthesis and writing). My problem is that I pursue these as an alternative career to being a regular dev, and am pretty quickly being dissuaded by the vision that, in the end, my work life will not improve that much.
For example, artists and gamedevs go through tons of anxiety and (usually) ultimately fail and need to find an alternative career. Or, even if they succeed in some manner (i.e. an artist getting a AAA concept artist position), they may become so overworked that they reach burn out pretty fast. Another alternative career I have in mind: being a developer/researcher in an area that's a blend between programming and maths (signal processing, CAD, computer vision etc.) looks interesting on the surface (i.e. I love to study the concepts, implement them in matlab etc.) but I'm afraid that I would end up in some company as an overworked and unhappy faceless cog. That's partly because I feel there's only so much truly interesting work available in this field, and it will most likely go to extremely talented people who have PhDs from MIT in this field - leaving "normies" like me to just do the mundane implementation, bug fixing etc.
I feel like I'm chained by the proverbial golden handcuffs. I can make six figures working on boring and tedious code remotely from my home in a very cheap country (I'm easily in the top 1% of income here). Doing the researcher/developer route would probably require moving to some other country, and thus trading some possible increase in job satisfaction for loneliness and alienation.
I've tried that a couple times (and my saving are growing, I'm at 30-50% of early retirement goal already). I just find it super-hard to hold on a boring job for longer than 6-12 months, and I convince myself that I should quit and do something else (my CV is pretty spotty because of that).
If I had a guy that comes and whacks me in the head every time I think about quitting a job, I'd probably already be retired.
For example, artists and gamedevs go through tons of anxiety and (usually) ultimately fail and need to find an alternative career. Or, even if they succeed in some manner (i.e. an artist getting a AAA concept artist position), they may become so overworked that they reach burn out pretty fast. Another alternative career I have in mind: being a developer/researcher in an area that's a blend between programming and maths (signal processing, CAD, computer vision etc.) looks interesting on the surface (i.e. I love to study the concepts, implement them in matlab etc.) but I'm afraid that I would end up in some company as an overworked and unhappy faceless cog. That's partly because I feel there's only so much truly interesting work available in this field, and it will most likely go to extremely talented people who have PhDs from MIT in this field - leaving "normies" like me to just do the mundane implementation, bug fixing etc.
I feel like I'm chained by the proverbial golden handcuffs. I can make six figures working on boring and tedious code remotely from my home in a very cheap country (I'm easily in the top 1% of income here). Doing the researcher/developer route would probably require moving to some other country, and thus trading some possible increase in job satisfaction for loneliness and alienation.
Life is hard.