This happens to a lot of people, especially 20-year-olds. You just feel worse about it because your job was "high paying", which is really just a quirk of circumstance and totally meaningless.

If you really wanted a soulless but high-paying job you hate, you'd be at Yale preparing for a career in finance.

It sounds like you don't really know what you want to do with your life right now. Nobody really does at 20. So I'm going to give you some advice nearly everyone here will hate: go to college.

My parents threw me out when I was 18, and I learned a few things really quickly. The most important was that in California, you can go to community college for free as long as you're poor (which I was by default as a line cook/graveyard shift baker), and knock out two out of four years of a bachelor's degree just dicking around, trying different things in different departments until something clicks.

You'll learn a ton. Most of it won't have to do with your degree. That totally doesn't matter and it's not the point.

With just a little bit of focus, you can come away with an associate's degree and a killer transfer application to get you in to a better college. Or, you can just drop out, and hopefully you'll at least have a better idea of what you want to do with your life, a little bit of experience, and a larger professional network than you started with.

I built my freelance programming and design career by teaching myself those skills while taking classes[1] and working in kitchens. By the end of the first half of year two, I wasn't working in kitchens anymore. Now my school is paying me to finish my bachelor's degree, and I'm turning down job offers every time I go to a meetup for my field, one that everybody tells me is supposed to be dying or something.

The other most important thing I learned was how to be happy while poor (not fake college student poor where you can always call your parents for more money, but real poor where you have a jar of peanut butter until pay day next week and your heat is turned off), and that poverty is worth not being subject to others' expectations and living on your own terms.

Not having money is not a real problem. Living with shitty parents who yell at you about money and wanting to kill yourself is. Get the fuck out of there and go to college. You will not regret it, as long as you don't pay for it.

I second the advice to stay off of Hacker News, because it's generally full of privileged overachievers who will make you feel worse (though not consciously) about your situation.

If you want any specific details about how to accomplish any of these things, feel free to contact me, info is in my profile.

1. Some of you are saying to yourselves, "Why were you teaching yourself while going to college? That's dumb, you shouldn't have been in college!" It's because outside of "elite" universities, programming knowledge is usually woefully out of date, and the nature of this field is such that the only one with any authority to say it's out of date is the one teaching the out-of-date course material. History, philosophy, and writing skills are much less dependent on the state of the art, and it's easier to find a skilled, accesible and receptive mentor in all of these fields than it is in programming or computer science.