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> wish I felt more "accomplished" in how I used my time.

Idk man I think a lot of people here would be proud to have knocked off even one of those things on that list. The lifestyle changes alone are huge accomplishments. I also wouldn’t downplay the significance of spending a little time doing nothing. Probably added some years to your life

This a thousand times! I've taken some years off work, but never three in a row: I don't think I'd manage it as well as you did.

I remember taking an incredibly light and schedule-y advantageous semester in college my junior year. I barely had to go to class and they were all frontloaded on Monday/Tuesday basically. I had so much free time and all these grand plans, none of which I actually followed through on lol

How do you go from unemployed for 3 years straight to upper management? Were you already in a similar position in the past? I would think 3 years unemployed may not look good to people who don’t share your personal views (no judgement, I think if you’ve been unemployed for 3 years it shows good financial planning, I just doubt my conservative family would see it the same)

My last role was staff engineer/team lead. The company I was with was acquired and I was asked to take director of engineering post-acquisition. I was pretty stressed out about how the acquisition was being mismanaged and declined the role, but stayed at the company for another year when 95% of my coworkers left. I generated a lot of goodwill with the PE firm and C-suite during this time.

After I left, the PE firm finished the ~failed merger, flipped the company to another buyer, and the PE firm placed the CTO at another company. I've remained friends with the CTO and we have a monthly/bi-monthly check-in. He was very supportive of my side-projects and would've helped fund anything that I said had legs, but is equally eager to work with me again if given the opportunity. The company he's working at is going through a reorg and a position he thinks I'd be a good fit for (admittedly a growth opportunity) should open up.

If that falls through and I'm not able to get a warm intro somewhere then you're absolutely right. I'd focus on applying for IC positions, but clearly communicate that I'm interested in taking on leadership ASAP.

Also unemployed for the last 3 years after a layoff. Partially on purpose because I felt I needed a pause to recharge but I kept extending because money was not a problem due to stonks going up.

I learned react, go. Played videogames and had a child. Things are going well.

Part of me is afraid that too much time off the market will make me not fit for the workforce anymore but tbh I feel like my mental health really needed this.

Now I'm faced with a dilemma. Go back to my home country where I probably could retire now at 40 or stay here and try to get back to work. Trump administration has been making my decision easier by the day.

> Go back to my home country where I probably could retire now

May want to consider that things won’t stay the same price for 40 years?

If the money is invested, it should be fine.

This. If the money is invested it should about follow inflation.

My friend, so much self-work, you should be proud. Contentedness comes from within. If you think about it, do you really want your worth to be determined by your career? Really? After beating the vices, investing in yourself? I'm proud of you.

There is no "accomplishment". Get off twitter and instagram, and seek contentedness. Everything else is creative self-deceit or comparison games on a rubric that is artificial and asinine.

No one actually cares about your title. Or rather, you probably know that them validating your title isn't really what's going to matter to you? Or is it? Why?

I say this with love, I spent a lot of time (albeit voluntarily) unemployed asking myself such questions. Good luck.

I thought caffeine was actually good

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/is-coffee-good-or-bad-for-your...

The dose makes the poison.

And genetics. Caffeine is a net negative for slow metabolizers.

And other environmental factors that affect enzyme levels, as seems to be the case for me.

Not if you’re a slow metabolizer. 15% of the population.

CYP1A2

Increased heart attack risk: A 2006 study found that slow metabolizers who drank four or more cups of coffee per day had a 64% increased risk of a nonfatal myocardial infarction (heart attack) compared to those drinking less than one cup daily. The risk was even higher for slow metabolizers under age 50, who experienced more than four times the risk

No increased risk for fast metabolizers: In the same study, fast metabolizers did not experience an increased risk of heart attack, even with high coffee consumption.

How does one find out being a slow or a fast metabolizer? DNA test?

You can do the basic continuous blood pressure monitoring. Not super precise but should work for categorizing.

Get your dna sequenced. A simple 23andme test would do.

https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/caffeine-metabolism-and-you...

Like the other commenter alluded to, if you consume caffeine and your BP remains really elevated past two hours, you’re probably a slow metabolizer.

I think from a health perspective coffee/caffeine is fine - maybe even good. I wouldn't be shocked if it were good for you.

My reason for wanting to quit caffeine was related to willpower and self-control. I wanted a stronger mind-body connection where I'd readily act on my desires rather than delegating to "I'll do that once I feel properly caffeinated." I was finding that I wasn't doing much with myself after work hours because my energy levels felt low once caffeine wore off and because I wasn't training myself to be comfortable doing things even when I didn't "feel" like doing them. Those behaviors made me uncomfortable with myself, but I never felt like I had the time to address them while working a full-time job. At best, I'd get two day "detoxes" over the weekend and then hop right back on the bean juice Monday morning.

I resonate with that way of thinking a lot.

fwiw: what you did is pretty impressive and hella brave, respect

Quitting caffeine helped me with anxiety and some mental health stuff. Ymmv

My milage does vary. I swore off caffeine for a decade. Then I discovered that stims restore some cognitive function that I had written off.

The difference is that my anxiety is more interesting (to me) than distressing. I can sometimes leverage it as a mechanism for change.

Granted - this also possible because my anxiety (currently) falls within a range. Turn it up a ½doz notches and I probably won't be mining it for usefulness.

Have you tried tea instead? Its effect is markedly different from coffee. THere should be no anxiety, but still contain that cognitive benefit.

I don't drink coffee. I use a drink mix. The anxiety is probably history derived. I'm rolling with it.

After some thought, I will give tea some fresh consideration. Mostly due to age wiping out my resistance to bad-choice consequences.

Would recommend green tea in particular. I love the Japanese teas.

I think I’m okay with scheduling my work around those known lulls, but I’m happy you shared your thoughts and perspective about it. Certainly gives me something to think about.

My take on the health benefits of coffee or tea is that it's probably nothing to do with the caffeine, and a lot to do with antioxidants. Both of these drinks are high in antioxidants, and the typical modern diet is low, so for a lot of people caffeinated drinks are a major source of their antioxidant intake. This shows up statistically as coffee and tea increasing longevity, but on an individual level, just make sure you're getting antioxidants from other parts of your diet instead.

> Hu said that moderate coffee intake—about 2–5 cups a day

5 cups of coffee per day is moderate?

True. But if you drink more than that, you should be using bigger cups.

The definition of "cup of coffee" used in studies often doesn't match the type of coffee drinks that people consume.

Typically, when someone cites these numbers they're referring to total caffeine intake under 400mg. It would be 5 small cups of mild coffee.

You can exceed this number with a single drink from Starbucks.

Not if you have high blood pressure, both it and salt can affect your B.P. Years ago I suffered with very bad dizzy spells which always began when I tried to get out of bed in mornings. They could last a few days. A doctor said another patient had same symptom and found reducing caffeine intake reduce them. I switched to decaf and progressively they got weaker, ultimately vanishing!

Caffeine withdrawals suck and it's a time and money sink keeping them at bay. I'm an habitual coffee drinker, love the caffeine high and the taste. I still wish I didn't get a headache by noon if I skipped a morning. A few days off the stuff and I'm fine, but it's still bothersome enough that sometimes I think it would justify quitting the habit.

It's enough work as it is staying fed, hydrated and getting a solid 8 hours of sleep. 20 minutes a day on getting your coffee fix is like 2 hours a week you could put to better purposes. Your article doesn't quantify the benefits, it just says there's some, that leads me to suspect that they're fairly minimal. Maybe getting an extra 2 hours of sleep or exercise would do more for your health.

I am on my sabatical now which I started to recover from burnout working in early stage startup. I stopped drinking coffee. I have drunk 4 to 8 coffees daily at work. It helped me to survive the day but I did not enjoy the taste. It was like eating pills. Also it did not help with sleep at night and rest during the day. I have not drink coffee or green tea for 4 months and now I have started again because I crave for coffee taste but I drink way less (3-4 coffees a week). Good think is that I enjoy it again, it helps me concentrate and also it does not interfere with my rest and sleep. The same applies to alcohol even in small amounts. It helps you to cope with overwork but it drains you in long term.

edit: So it is not only about health but also about satisfaction and well being.

When I see my interns drinking Red Bull for work: I get it that you have extremely high career objectives, but maybe you’re stressing about them more than working on them.

Worst case, you can work 8hrs during the day and study 3hrs in the evening with or without Red Bull: in both cases you’ll end up burnt out, you can just force it for a few months more with drugs.

It's neither good nor bad in absolute terms. It can be misused, abused, and overdone like any substance.

In my experience, the people who benefit from quitting caffeine were either using far too much of it, were drinking it too late in the day (interferes with sleep), or were using it to cover up other problems like poor sleep habits.

The person drinking a cup or two of green tea in the mornings after going to bed on time is going to have a different relationship than the person drinking very strong coffee drinks all day long to stay awake because they've been scrolling on their phone until 2AM every night instead of trying to sleep on time.

For those who can't metabolize it it's a net negative. Even a sip in the morning keeps me on edge the whole day and delays my sleep onset by around an hour.

What industry do you want to work in? Pick a vertical market and make stuff for it. Look at government RFI/RFP to see what is needed, follow the trends.

Honestly, if you didn't struggle financially, it seems to me that you've had a pretty good time and that your perception that you're not accomplished enough in how you used your time is mostly a byproduct of our tendency to always be unsatisfied rather than stemming from your past few years having truly lacked purpose :-)

Making games in rust in retirement is my plan. Not, you know, good games (zero game dev experience), or games that anyone would realistically want to play, but seems like it would be interesting to learn.

I’d like to invest time into the Linux gaming ecosystem. Though it’s a little daunting that so much of the work would need to be done by Nvidia and major game studios that don’t really care.

Windows just feels irredeemably mediocre at this point. Maybe Windows 12 will improve things, but I’ve been pretty down on 11.

Yeah exactly :) I had no experience and, if I'm being honest, I was shit at game dev, but boy is it a nice means of creative self-expression. (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ / https://ant.care/)

It's really fulfilling to be able to show people your work and have them play with it. It's so different than like.. spec'ing out a new database schema and then building some APIs over it. They're both coding, but one's a little harder to have a convo about at the dinner table.

Rust is such a mature language to use coming from a JavaScript background. I don't think it makes the best language for writing good games because it's too challenging to write bad prototypes you intend to throw away. You have to refactor frequently and code-compile-run loop is so slow. The lack of quick prototyping discourages me from playing around with ideas that might not work out and that makes for a worse game. However, as a programmer, Rust is an incredibly satisfying language to write in. Everything you do always feels very technically correct. The Rust quip that "if it compiles then it probably works" is very accurate and is a continuous source of pleasure.

Not to push you into the rabbit hole but... have you looked into bolting some sort of scripting language onto your Rust program for quick prototyping?

I haven't looked into it seriously, no. Scripting support in Bevy (the ECS framework I was exploring) is pretty limited. There's an add-on that can provide unofficial support for LUA (https://github.com/makspll/bevy_mod_scripting) but I doubt that would be compatible with a WASM build target.

>I doubt that would be compatible with a WASM build target.

In principle, I don't see why not. In practice, yeah I can see it. In both cases, can't know without checking, and I haven't. Bevy is pretty cool though!

My drive-by suggestions would be more along the lines of https://github.com/mattwparas/steel, or the very ad-hoc embedded language of https://github.com/elkowar/eww, or perhaps most pertinently https://kdl.dev/

Maybe one of those would be minimal enough for the rest of the engine to not manage to get your way, as frameworks are known to do. As always, happy hacking!

s|your way|in the way|

As someone coming on 30 months of retirement, I'm consciously shifting away from toy projects to projects where I commit to a more polished deliverable.

It helps with commitment and pursuing a deeper learning of the activity instead of doing quick and dirty stuff in my experience. Just don't expect it (or aim for it) to be a steam top-seller, my aim is usually to have at least one other stranger get some amount of value out of what I produce.

Not to say there isn't a place for quick and dirty projects, of course. Bespoke 3D models to fix things around the house are my current favourite category for that.

I'll see how I really feel when it happens but when I retire I don't want to look at a computer for a very long time. I suppose after some time I might get drawn back but I plan to de-tech my life as much as I can.

Beast mode