You're right, and my best employment experience so far probably came from Adecco placing me at hp for a year in the early 2000s. I'm just not good at advocating for myself. And my AuDHD tendencies create a feeling of overwhelm, that I need to solve the world's problems, even though I'm the one affected. So I obsess over reforming the gig economy and startups and UBI instead of putting myself out there. Recruiters help a lot, although then I feel like I'm on call, never knowing when the next opportunity will hit me when I'm in the middle of work I've already invested so much time and effort into.

The gloom comes from knowing that had I just worked company jobs with 6 figure salaries, I'd be retired by now instead of still at square one. And I never bought Bitcoin when it was $10. And I never had money at the time to invest in Google when it opened at $85 and everyone knew it would go to $100, and it did, opening day if I recall correctly. Same with Apple, when it was $12 but I had no money to buy shares.

That's how capitalism works. As you get wins, they let you invest in further wins to eventually create a stream of unearned income large enough to more than cover living expenses.

But if you never have a single win - not in the beginning and not ongoing - then you watch on the sidelines as countless people with less experience and expertise, who haven't tried as hard, who don't even know what they're doing half the time, fly past you into financial security.

And why did I never have a win? Because the rules of the game that I started under changed. In high school, I didn't know anyone with a computer besides a handful of my friends. There was no internet or cell phones, just the BBS. Geeks weren't cool. We didn't know girls. We barely had cars, passed down to us from parents, if we were lucky. The only real jobs in my small hometown were flipping burgers and moving irrigation pipe.

The reasons I went into tech are largely irrelevant today. And if I knew then that our combined efforts were driving us towards a service economy, wealth inequality and tech dystopia, I might never have gone into it. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer and cure all genetic disorders, eventually helping to cure senescence.

Which I'm not sure I even truly care about anymore, because at midlife there is a certain allure to starting over in the next life to lose one's memories. I understand Joker and Loki sentiments that I never expected or wanted. Or at least, I'm able to forgive those that scream "let me out!" like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang about. And have survivor guilt, that I'm still here after losing loved ones so close to me.

So the central challenge is how to get over myself, to forget the horrors I've seen, to somehow reintegrate with the 3D and reenter the matrix. I basically have startup PTSD from so many tries without a win. Basically a veteran like Rambo, I've seen too much, am highly capable, but can barely take care of myself and would be homeless if not for the help of family and friends.

I really appreciate your advice though. It's good to get honest feedback from someone able to see the situation impartially. Writing this out helps me see that the barriers before me are not so much societal, but self-imposed perhaps.