After I got laid off, being unemployed was the best thing to happen to my mental health — I just backpacked everywhere for a few months, and built a lot of longer-term perspective on my life.

Getting away from the perpetual "oh god I don't have a stable income" fear, even after having worked in tech for many years and accruing plenty of savings, was the absolute hardest thing in my life (it's definitely privilege to have those savings, but I never FELT that privilege; I always felt one month away from falling off a financial cliff).

(I ended up jumping into bootstrapping products/dabbling in founding startups, then "leaving" tech into clinical work as a research software engineer).