That's mostly what I've been doing too, and that's helped a bit, but the last few days the depression has started getting the best of me. I got rejected for a few jobs where I genuinely thought I aced the interviews, and it's put me into a really foul mood.
I am sure things will eventually improve, and maybe this is a sign that I've tied far too much of a my self worth into my career, but it's sometimes hard to stay optimistic.
How anyone reasonably expects me to not tie self worth to a task that I enjoy doing, and perform a minimum of 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a mystery to me. The same goes for the folks that think the environment that I spend that time in should somehow not have an effect on my well-being.
The best I can do is understand how deeply broken the hiring process has been for a while now, and that we have still found a way to make it worse in the past few years.
It also probably helps that while my personal endeavors have so far generated $0 and I'll need to address the cash flow situation in some way soon, they have generated more genuine satisfaction than my last job. Which is surprising because I generally liked the work in my last role.
There are billions of people on earth that work everyday to support their addictions to food and shelter. I wake up in the morning, walk over to my office in the next room, work 8 hours, shut my computer down and money gets deposited into my account.
I've been working on a project that eventually be something I could parlay into something that could make money, though unless I'm able to convince a VC to give me money I find it unlikely that that will actually happen, and I have absolutely no idea how the hell I would go about pitching this to a VC in the first place. I probably would need to befriend someone with business acumen.
I wouldn't VC anything personally, that'd be just trading one leash for another.
That's fair. I think I can deploy a fairly minimal version of what I'm doing on a relatively cheap cluster of servers on DigitalOcean or Hetzner or something.
Only issue I have is that I have absolutely no idea how to promote the stuff I'm working on.