About a little over a year ago at time of writing (October 2020), I lost my job due to stress-induced ill health (mainly depression and burnout) leaving me unable to perform it to the level required of me, thanks to COVID. Since then, I've spent a month in hospital and been gradually recovering, with therapy for about four or five months afterward, which cost a lot of money.
Nobody's been hiring Software/Web Developers in my part of the country in which I live, since we're not essential workers and coders weren't at the top of people's priority lists (also thanks to COVID trashing the economy). I've applied to jobs and got phone calls and requests for my CV, but nothing further. That, combined with the cost of therapy, ate through my savings and retirement annuity. (Paying rent and buying food when you're earning less than your cost of living will wreck you financially and quite quickly. As it is, I owe at least $1 500 or more in unpaid loans.)
I'm hoping that with both the changing of the year and the fact that I've had both my vaccination shots, the wind might finally change and fill my sails again, because I have absolutely no money to my name save what I make exercising dogs and working as a gardener for an office block near where I live, or begging for it. (I've been thinking of selling my car and buying a bicycle just to have some money to keep me going, since everywhere I need to go in this town, I can get to by foot or bike, even if it takes me a few hours.)
The other thing, too, is that I no longer have any inclination toward software/Web development as a career. Honestly, I'd rather pull my hair out stand by strand; it's no less painful nor tedious for me. What I really want to do is exercise dogs at the kennels where I work, to do work outside on a farm or smallholding, work that's of tangible and practical good where I can see the benefits/effects of my labour on a daily to weekly basis, rather than some abstract airy-fairy thing far removed from the people on whom it has an impact. I also want to earn my living from writing. However, neither of those things are going to happen and also pay for my cost of living (at least not any time soon and I'm running out of time to get back on my feet and heading out on my own path again). Back to a soul-destroying grind of cyclical tedium I must go in order to have some quality of life (not that I'll have much of a resemblance of one after nine or ten hour shifts). Modern life is rubbish; it doesn't make any sense to me.
Today, as I was leaving work, I overheard a customer remark, "the dogs look so cute and happy". I chuckled quietly and smiled to myself. To me, that's far more important and valuable, brings me more happiness than knowing I'll get a fat bonus on my next salary payment because I helped build some software that helped a corporation land a contract for almost a couple of bars. However, nobody who's supposed to be close to me can see or understand that; they're too money-driven/focussed to see that it's not what makes me happy, that to me it's just a means, not an end. It never should be a goal, but a tool used to get to it.
Lead image: Photo by Nathan Cowley from/on Pexels