I can tell you what happens because I moved furniture for 3 years after I graduated college so I could work on my internet business:

Failure.

Utter, complete, soul-crushing, devastating failure. Not just in one thing. I'm talking a 20 year death march finally ending in burnout in 2019 just before the pandemic. My experience has been that the more mindless the work, the more psychologically taxing it is for creative types like pretty much everyone on this site. Opportunity cost becomes all-consuming.

My regret is the opposite of yours. I wish I had gone and worked for a major corporation for a few years and saved up a few hundred grand so I could get out from under obligation and invent the things that I was born to build.

I wish I had lived in a van and avoided expenses and helped with communal projects in a makerspace.

I wish I had worked on any personal project at all of my choosing, instead of letting others dictate which personal projects had merit and coopting my motivation.

My spirit has been so utterly shattered so many times, that I no longer hold strong beliefs or expectations. I've toiled under such a level of negative reinforcement for so many years that I no longer trust my own instincts. I don't believe that the future will necessarily get better, that the past even existed, or that (as the article said) money comes from doing the things we love.

But you know what? I feel alive for the first time since I was maybe 5 years old. Watching the world work through some of the existential crises that I've faced since the 90s has been very healing for me.

I have no great words of wisdom to impart. But I do feel a calling to find peace. In my own life, I've been practicing service to others, who are an aspect of myself under reincarnation and the multiverse (quantum immortality, etc). Which looks like setting boundaries and communicating intentions even if I can't meet them at that time. It means basic kindness to everyone I meet, even finding ways to love them no matter how much I disagree with them. And giving them the dignity to succeed and fail and learn in their own way.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've largely abandoned logic, because I've experienced what it's like to try as hard as I can but have it end in tragedy. Bad things still happen no matter how much we try to prevent them. But good things also happen when we aren't expecting them, through the infinite power of serendipity (one of the forces that created the universe). So I've shifted to magical thinking (faith, hope, love, meditation/prayer, manifestation, etc) and have witnessed how reality has shifted to reflect my inner world (as above, so below). Now I walk in wonder as the world solves nearly every problem I wanted to solve, but without my ego's attachment.

Next steps for me are to keep applying small moves to shift laterally into neighboring realities along this timeline. This is an embrace of the free will that science claims doesn't exist. It's seeking meaning through art and culture as our system of necessity works tirelessly to obliterate it. That's how and why I'm working towards the rejection of economic systems, since they're based on constructs like artificial scarcity and denial that wealth creates poverty for someone else through ignorance of karma. Loosely, that looks like being as vegetarian as possible, while still providing for the nutritional needs of my body when warranted. It looks like acknowledging my inner monologue but recognizing that it's not my consciousness, and heeding my subconscious by being an audience for my dreams. And showing up, even on days when I start from a place of zero energy, which is all too often in these times.

I wouldn't trade the pain I've experienced, since it resulted in my conscious awakening. Being here now is priceless.

If this all sounds like gobbledegook, and maybe it is, then you the reader have the priceless gift of youthful thinking on your side. Run with that and don't get dragged down by rantings from old burnouts like me. Your achievements remind me that anything is possible, even when I'm my own worst critic and limit myself with labels like I just did. Everyone has to find their own way.