[mpdehaan2]

I could write a few pages here and hope maybe they can help someone.

Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes.

Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt.

It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there.

But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved?

Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience for, this can become pretty isolating.

It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for "what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest.

Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment".

Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience.

It's not really as real as I thought.

We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes.

But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun.

My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight.

There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be.

I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer?

It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)