You are burnt out and stressed, so I completely understand the general despair/malaise that drips through from your posts.

However, you are getting in the way of your own success. What's the alternative? Being 39 with no degree? Delaying the degree even further, so that you're 45 with a degree and 24 years of experience, and still competing with 22 year olds? Starting now, is better than not starting. If you're going through hell now, keeping going and don't stop moving forward (otherwise you'll be stuck in hell forever).

You can do this. You can make positive changes to your life and your career. It will not be easy (in fact, it will absolutely suck over the next 1-3 years, but even this you can try to mitigate somewhat). It will not be the ideal course you might've wanted for your life. You may not out-compete all the 22 year olds. But that's okay. Life is not a schedule, and whether some 22 year olds are better or worse off than you, doesn't affect the quality or enjoyment of YOUR life (or at least, it shouldn't, unless you allow it to mentally and emotionally affect you).

Being burnt out or depressed or whatnot, tends to give anyone a very negative outlook on the world, which is insidious in 2 ways: (1) it robs you of the ability to feel joy from even small wins (and even robs you of the ability to recognize what is a win, like signing up for college, passing a tough exam, or cleaning out your attic, or whatever); (2) it makes you think that there is no hope, no possibility of improvement (which is simply not true, if only you could interrupt your own thought patterns enough to see it).

Being on HN is kind of a double-edged sword for lots of folks like you who may be struggling in their careers (and when I say "struggle", I don't mean underperforming or being bad at their work, though that is also an issue for others but not in your case I think), where on the positive side, you can try to draw inspiration from the "can-do" attitude that naturally goes hand-in-hand with "hacker" mentality, with startups disrupting industries, with believing that it is possible to move mountains and upend institutions through innovation and hard work. On the negative side though, you are also inevitably going to see yourself as being compared to 22 year old founders and millionaires, or new college grads getting entry-level FAANG jobs for ~$200k+, and of course it can steal away joy or contentment from your own life or your own trials and tribulations (and successes!).

You need to try and draw out the positives while staying away from the negative comparisions, to feel inspired by the "can-do" energy of all the different types of "hackers" launching anything from personal projects to unicorn startups, and then translate that into your own life, so that you start to see how you can creatively problem-solve for your own situation.

Start with problem #1, working 60hrs/week with no end in sight... Can you simply refuse? Is your overtime mandatory? You shouldn't care about performance reviews or making a good impressions, because you don't want this job at this company in the long-run anyways. You just need to do barely enough work to not get fired, so that you have income while earning your degree and preparing your exit strategy. Or OTOH: could you actually quit? Another poster mentioned actually taking that job at McDonald's, which I think could make perfect sense, IF it actually affords you the chance to focus on and accelerate your degree, and IF it actually reduces your hours and your stress.

The point is, all of these are just random suggestions, but you're paralyzed by your burnout/depression, and not able to problem-solve effectively. If you can fix that, and start to think about it as creating a flywheel of positive changes in your life, then each individual change may be small, but they can accumulate and it will get easier and easier over time, for you to move your life in the direction that you want.

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EDIT to add: I just poked around your personal blog a bit, and I saw this entry from you, back in July 2021. I think this is a really amazing and very healthy perspective you shared there, and I would encourage you to think about your life in relation to this sort of cohort that you are learning together with, which is much more realistic, much more grounded, vs comparing yourself to some hypothetical 22 year olds. Think about your classmates in their 60s, the recovering addicts, the former prison inmate who's trying to improve their life. If they can do this, then so can you... keep pushing! You wrote these words yourself. You have the seeds for your own success.

> The group you gather with, if it is anything like mine, is likely to contain quite a variety of people. My gathering contains 2 immigrants, a Canadian couple, people ranging in age from 20s to 60s, 2 individuals that are converts to the Church within the past year and a half, blue and white-collar workers, 2 recovered addicts, and even someone improving their life via education after having served time in prison, and we have 3 native languages represented with no communication difficulties in our group. It’s a truly diverse group and I’ve definitely been inspired by, and learned from, the unique experiences of my gathering-mates and I would suspect my unique experiences have also helped some of them. I definitely feel like I have a much more diverse group of people here than I would in a traditional brick-and-mortar college program where I live.

https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflectio...