I can really empathize with this. I only spent a bit under 20 years in IT and I fucked off a couple of years ago, after I realized I’m going to jump off a cliff if I don’t. I unironically think that the Internet has turned out to be a huge mistake and that our plains ape brains just aren’t ready for any of this, and that IT in general is largely making things worse for humanity.

I still really like computer science though, enjoy coding (but only personal projects with questionable utility, more code-as-art than anything goal-oriented), and think that computation as a phenomenon is absolutely fascinating. Went back to university a couple of months ago with the plan to maybe nerd out on things like cellular automata and evolutionary computation, but very quickly noticed that – thanks to some newly acquired autoimmune problems which led to things like me having to get a fairly relevant internal organ yanked out – I can’t concentrate worth shit and eg. studying mathematics just isn’t happening even with ADHD medication (which I’ve been using on and off ever since my diagnosis in the early 00’s).

I’ve been living off savings for the couple of years I’ve been out of IT, but I really have to start thinking about how the hell I’m going to keep on living and I’ve also thought about just doing pretty much any job that wouldn’t require anything except rudimentary cognitive input from me, something like sorting mail or whatever.

I hope you find a new path for yourself. Explore the language idea? Maybe there’s something there