> Another thing that helped me was researching other careers. I found a couple of things I think I would get a great deal of satisfaction from. I felt very trapped in a career I hated, and looking at another 30+ years of this was like a dark cloud over me.

I sometimes wish I had gone to school, but for something other than CS. I got into software development with no career at all, there arent a ton of other interesting fields open to uneducated people. If I had gone to school for some other subject I was interested in, i could still have the option of a well-padi software career, but also in something else that fascinates me, as well as opening up a new class of "hybrid jobs" using programming in specialized domains