I try to keep perspective, anyway.

My first real job while living away from my parents was being a performer at Disneyland. It was actually fun as fuck, but they scaled back the entertainment department after 9/11, laid off a bunch of people, and that included me. In a relatively low-paying job with no savings, I couldn't make rent and had to live out of my car for a month and rely completely on the kindness and generosity of others to get back on my feet.

Right after college, I managed a bar for a while. Again, very fun, but it's hard not to drink too much, especially when very young and very stupid. I woke up one morning blacked out with a dent in my car and still have no idea what happened. I got to witness women I hired being pressured into shooting for a swimsuit calendar I could tell they didn't want to do. Rich kid assholes utterly ruin people's lives out of pure spite. The owner made me fire a woman for theft when I knew she was innocent.

I eventually joined the Army. Again, quite a bit of fun charging around on top of tanks, firing a .50 caliber machine gun and standing on top of a cannon, in a vehicle that can go right through 6-foot diameter trees like they aren't even there. But my buddy's gunner got hit by a rocket and he had to spend two days cleaning barely differentiated guts off of everything in the conex. Guy in my platoon shot himself on the last day of deployment because his wife was leaving him and he didn't want to go home. I was in the last unit to leave Iraq, and seeing what happened after, and then adding Afghanistan on top of that. Man, if you feel like you suffered for nothing, this was just next level 'what the fuck did we do all this for?' 20-hour shifts with 30 minutes of sleep a night if you got lucky. Zero days off for months on end. Marriages ruined left and right. I even got my own thankfully amicable, no kids at least divorce out of it.

I ended up with pretty horrible chronic spine problems that led to multiple interbody fusions, a whole lot of titanium hardware, and years being barely able to walk, often in enough pain that my entire personality palpably changed and I felt powerless to stop it. When the Army tried to treat me, they put me in traction to the point that it herniated worse, I passed out on the machine, and fell so hard onto the hospital floor that I got a TBI bad enough that I wasn't allowed to drive for two months until I could prove I was able to stand straight and touch my hand to a moving pencil. I went back to my hometown and totally forgot entire people existed who had apparently been huge parts of my life. I have no idea how many memory holes I have as I continually discover them talking to my family. Got 0% from the VA for that one.

I'm not here for the pain Olympics or anything and don't want to downplay the struggles of others, but being in software is the cushiest, easiest shit I could ever have imagined. I'm paid more than I ever would have thought possible without running my own business or being a surgeon when I was a kid. I work from home with all the free time in the world but still travel enough that I'm not just sitting in the same room every day forever. I very rarely work more than a 40 hour week or 8 hour day. The vast majority of what I work on goes nowhere and ends up abandoned or canceled, but every now and then, something makes it to fruition and I get to see it used and feel legitimate pride knowing I made it happen. People nominally above me in an org chart are deferent, polite, constantly asking if they can do anything for me. People just believe me when I say something.

Contrast this with the Army where it's legal, in-line with normal culture, and all but expected that bosses will publicly humiliate you, yell at you in front of your coworkers, you're constantly under a spotlight, stack ranked annually against your entire battalion by people who don't even know you. You'll get fired if you can't run fast enough or get fat. I got yelled at and censured once for not returning a call from my commander within five minutes when I was mowing my damn lawn and didn't hear the phone ring. You have literally no time off, whether or not you're home or out of town. Continuous mandatory recall. I was called in to bail guys out of prison at 3 AM on a Sunday morning. You rotate through 24-hour shifts called "staff duty" once a month because someone has to always be present in the headquarters. You don't get a day off the next day.

Software developers have absolutely no appreciation of how good they have it.