This is a great response. I'm about 10 years sooner in my career than you. With young kids at home...I'm still holding hope that I can effectively balance my own health, family, spirituality, etc. with a product/technology I'm passionate about.
Maybe I'm just not seeking out the right groups/networks...but I increasingly struggle to trade-off a project that I'm passionate about with time spent focusing on health/family.
I remember going to a psychiatrist for the first time when I was around 30 and I told him "well there is fun code and unfun code". I was explaining how I hated my job at the time I had to write unfun code all day long but my side projects, that was fun code.
He looked at me like I was literally a crazy person and said, "Ok, explain more what you mean by un-fun code..."
At the time I sighed and thought oh geeze, this is so painfully obvious how do I even explain the difference. BUT looking back now, nope. He was right. That is crazy. It's all just code. The people and your attitude make all the difference.
Before enlightenment: write code, fix bugs. After enlightenment: write code, fix bugs.
> pick one and fall in love with your co-workers, make them friends, and do tech for the sake of tech.
Not caring about what you are building and why is how we got here. Too many hyper focused people in tech only interested if they could do things without wondering if they should.
Precisely how we now have technology-oligarchs who got rich off of the work of such single minded people now destroying the country.
Enough people thinking like this is what has led to people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin to thrive and become influential.
Sure that algorithm is cool and all but it’s been used for techno-fascism.
Maybe I'm just not seeking out the right groups/networks...but I increasingly struggle to trade-off a project that I'm passionate about with time spent focusing on health/family.