Have you ever found yourself with a feeling of emptiness, feeling some kind of melancholy that you can’t explain? If the answer is yes, let me tell you that I have felt it too, and it hasn’t been easy to turn it off. In this post, I want to share the personal and professional crisis that I’m going through and the things that I’m doing to escape it.
Before continuing, let me tell you that I know how crazy this story is going to sound and how hard it is to believe it, but it’s mine and it’s the only one I’ve got.
Context and Guide
Hey, if you are looking for a bullet-list or guide, jump straight to the part of this article called: “What I’m doing to solve it”. If you want to know my story and maybe get some context from there, just keep reading.
I’m Juan, and I’m a few days away from celebrating my birthday. Let me tell you that the last three years have been crazy for me. I’ve changed my job, almost died, and found myself deep in a professional crisis. Now I live with my girlfriend, and I think I’m pretty close to getting what I want for my life, but before going there, let me give you some context about how I am.
How Everything Started
If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I was just 12 years old, I would have answered that I wanted to be a physicist. I loved science and especially physics. I spent most of my childhood playing video games and reading physics books, hoping someday to make a scientific contribution.
Things didn’t go that way. When I was 13 years old, my parents asked me what I wanted to study, and I gave that same answer. To my surprise, my parents gently explained to me that they couldn’t afford such an education and that I should forget it. Anyway, physicists don’t make any money, or at least that’s what my parents taught me back then.
Just one year later, I got to know one of my now best friends, Natz (this is a nickname, not his real name). I was playing video games, and he was streaming the match. I entered his Twitch channel, and we became good friends; that’s the story in a nutshell. We got so close that we talked almost daily. Natz was around 30 years old back then and worked from home, so most of the time, he was available to talk and play. I was a teenager with nothing to do—perfect friends. At that time, I also realized for the first time that the economic state of my country, Argentina, was going through a hard time, and it didn’t seem like it was going to change anytime soon. So, like any teenager who gets terrified with his country and doesn’t know what he is going to do with his life, I decided that I wanted to emigrate to Canada (it was a good country to emigrate to if you were an Argentinean at that time).
I investigated, and I figured that one of the jobs with the best salaries and relocation possibilities was software development. Surprise, surprise, Natz was a software developer. I ran to my Discord account and wrote: “Hey Natz, can you teach me how to code?” His answer was something like: “Complete these courses, and if you do it, we’ll talk again about this.” Just one week later, I finished them. I asked him again about it, and this was his answer: “Normally, no one finishes them and asks me back.” He gave me more courses and helped me develop my first JavaScript bot for Discord. Just a few months later, Natz came to me with this message: “Hey Juan, I have a project, and I need help. Do you want to help me code it?”
There I was, I got my first project with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I couldn’t believe it, and he was even going to pay me. We finished it; nothing special, just a web page with basic CSS and JS for an e-sport team that I think now doesn’t even exist. The important part is, that’s when I realized that I could really do this—coding for a living.
I decided to get more projects for myself, and that’s how I started. Buying courses on Udemy, reading books from the internet, and watching every possible course along the way. I started to develop my first side project, Smart-Restaurant, and I was working with any local business that wanted a web page, system, or application. I wasn’t afraid to tackle projects way over my head. I kind of loved the pressure it gives you, knowing that you need to finish something that you don’t even know how to start (this is something that I do until now, and sometimes it is great and sometimes it destroys me).
My parents couldn’t understand it; they thought I was getting money from God knows where. When I was 16 years old, I landed my first “big” job with a start-up from Buenos Aires. That was my first time experiencing the feeling of having a real job—coding on demand, doing things how they asked me, and working on things that maybe were out of my scope of interest. I was lucky. My parents never forced me to go to school, and I would stay at home as much as I wanted. Obviously, there was a minimum number of times that I had to fulfill if I wanted to finish school, and the guys I worked for understood it. For that reason, I was working for objectives and not hours. They were really open-minded, and we are friends until now. They taught me most of the things that helped me land my next job.
Just a couple of months later, after my 18th birthday, I landed one of my biggest jobs at an international company. It was my first full-time job as a full-stack developer working on a USA project. Also, it was a face-to-face job, so I had to attend the office. Due to that and the fact that I couldn’t study what I wanted, I decided to drop out of university and dedicate myself full-time to my job (I was studying computer science). The pay was really good at that time. I was a junior trainee, and they were paying me something around $1500. That amount in Argentina is a bunch of money.
The conflict in my house persisted, so I decided it was time to get out of my parents’ house and live on my own. That’s how, at just 18 years old, I quit university, separated from my family (not in the most peaceful way), and moved out. It took me just a couple of months to get my first raise that year. My performance was so good that they had to move me from junior trainee to junior advanced. That year, I got nine raises, going from junior trainee to project lead in just one year. I know, extreme, but you need to take into consideration that at this point, I had been doing this for almost five years. Also, I knew how to speak English better than most of my team members, something really helpful in a company that gave us close contact with the client.
And that’s the story of how, at just 19 years old, I was completely alone, having a high-paying job and living entirely on my own.
Then is When it Struck Me
I can remember it as if it happened yesterday. I woke up to prepare myself to go to work, but I felt different—tired, sad. I felt an emptiness like I had never felt before. I went to my job anyway (like I could not do it). I finished my day and went home. I worked out. I didn’t feel quite good, but I ignored it. I was really stressed. I sat on my couch and ate dinner. Then I started crying. I couldn’t explain it. I wasn’t where I wanted to be. This feeling wasn’t going anywhere; it came to stay for a long time. Every week it was becoming worse. Until one week, I felt completely empty. Then is when I said to myself that this had been enough, and I decided to go to therapy.
My therapist is fantastic, and even now that I don’t necessarily need to go, I visit her from time to time just to talk. If you are feeling things like the ones I’m describing, I strongly encourage you to go and find a therapist.
My therapist helped me, and I tried to help myself by watching YouTube videos, reading books, and listening to podcasts. I was feeling worse and worse every day. I didn’t want to do anything at all, but I forced myself to keep doing it through willpower. After a time, I couldn’t exactly say when my therapist came to the conclusion that I was going through a personal and professional crisis.
I was lacking purpose in my life, feeling that what I was doing wasn’t interesting at all—”leading” a team and developing projects for a company that I didn’t care about. I wanted to do something more interesting, more challenging, something that helped people.
Then is when I tried to do things outside of my job, only to realize I had something around three hours free in my day during the week. I woke up at 8:45 to go to work around 9:00, got out at 18:00, arrived home at 18:15, did my necessities, it’s 19:00, worked out, it’s 20:00, made dinner, and there you go—you are too tired to do anything, and the day is almost over.
That destroyed me. The math was against me. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do anything. But I didn’t give up. I put in all the effort that I could to push as many activities as I could to get something out of that time. I was studying, trying things, making plans, developing side projects. At the same time, my therapist was asking me to be more
social, so I started to code after my job at a coffee shop (good idea, you’ll understand why later).
It’s worth mentioning that in my job, I did all that I could to get even more out of those hours—reading, watching courses, and secretly programming my own things. Even with all that effort and neglecting my health, I couldn’t do enough to escape from it. To add even more complexity to the process, I suffered a medical problem (I don’t like talking about this) that required a medical intervention that almost made me lose a leg and was kind of complex (I insist, I don’t like talking about this). Because of that, I was feeling so physically sick, and the stress and psychological problems didn’t help. I had to go through an extensive time of recovery to be able to walk again and an even longer process to be able to work out again. Thanks to this, I’ll always have some pain in my leg, but I feel much better now.
It’s Coming to an End
Yep, I know you are probably asking yourself how old I am now. The answer: 20, almost 21. In two weeks, it’s my birthday. The last three years have been a roller coaster. If you are anything like me, you love a happy ending. I really do. And that’s the case. Now I work much more relaxed, I have a personal and social life, I feel physically and psychologically better, I have my partner who I’ve been dating for a year and a half now, and we are already living together (very happily). So if you want to know what I did to get to this point, just keep reading.
What I Did and Am Still Doing to Solve It
As you read before, it took me a while to transform my life into a mess, and fixing it is also taking a considerable amount of time. I’m saying this because if you are going through the same process, you need to understand that this is not going to be easy.
What Do You Want?
This is probably the question I should have asked myself back then when I started studying software development. I didn’t decide to study software development because I really loved it, but instead, I did it out of necessity. Now I invite you to ask yourself what you really want and be honest; no one is judging you.
Ready? I hope so. Below is my answer.
Now, after seven years, I can say that software development can be extremely boring and also extremely exciting. But after so much time, it is already part of me, so I know for sure that I want to keep doing this (with some changes, obviously). At the same time, I want something else. While leading a project for the company where I used to work before, I discovered that I’m really good at teaching people and I’m also really good at finding talent. So I would like to do something that connects both of those things. Last but not least, I want to do something related to science. I’ll probably try to get a degree in math or physics once all this is more stable.
Refine the Details
Okay, I hope you answered the previous question. Now we are going to polish the details. This is something like trying to create a mind map. Please write down the things you like about the things you are already doing and also write down the things that you want to do.
This is mine:
Right Now:
- Love coding
- Love solving hard problems
- Love communicating with people in other languages
In the Future:
- Science
- Leading projects and teaching people
- Having freedom
Ok, we have our list. Now I invite you to think of the easiest solution for this problem. Most people will jump straight to entrepreneurship and stuff like that, but most of the time, that’s the hardest solution. So hopefully, you can come up with a different answer. Here are some solutions that may apply:
- Changing jobs
- Renegotiating in your current job
The previous two options are pretty good for most people, and many of them don’t even consider them.
In my case, and most likely in your case too, the best answer is entrepreneurship. Given that it’s the hardest solution, we’ll have to make many sacrifices, and we’ll need a good plan.
It’s Not About Yourself
Sadly, if you are inclined towards entrepreneurship, let me tell you the harsh truth. Nobody cares about your plan or your business. And don’t get me wrong; I would love to hear your idea, and probably many people out there will too. But most of the time, the ideas that we think are going to rock it don’t end up that way.
If you are picking entrepreneurship instead of changing jobs or renegotiating, it’s probably because you want the ideal freedom that comes with it. Sadly, that’s the fruit that comes from sacrificing many things. If we want to achieve that, we’ll need to understand something really basic, but that evades most of us. We’ll need someone’s money. If we want someone to give us money, we’ll need to offer something in exchange, and it ideally will be something that our customer wants. So it’s not about ourselves or our idea; it’s about what our potential customer wants. So don’t waste too much time working on something that nobody wants to pay for. If you want more information about this, read my post 48hs is all you need for your project.
And finally, when you are pricing something, think about this. Let’s say your barber is asking you for $10,000 for a haircut. What would you feel? Probably you’ll feel that this guy is trying to make himself rich with you. I hate when something like that happens. So often, when I have to put a price on something, I take that into consideration.
It’s Going to Be a Long Run
Whatever you choose and whatever you are doing, if you want to change your life, you’ll need time, plenty of time. If you are thinking that you can do this on the first try or just in one month, sorry, my boy, you are not being realistic. It will be better if you accept upfront that it is going to be hard.
Once you accept it, you can make a plan. Right now, I’m still trying to stabilize my businesses. I have a coffee shop, I’m developing two projects, writing blogs, and working for a big company as a senior developer. I’m not telling you this because I want to show off how full my schedule is, but instead because I know my plan is going to take a lot of time, and because I know I’m doing too many things. Next month, I’ll have to reduce the number of activities that I’m doing because I’m a human being, and I need to breathe, eat, do sports, and have a life in general, and you do too. So when you are making your plan, be realistic. Estimate for the long term, don’t give yourself too many options to quit, and take into consideration that you need to have a life outside of your projects and your “dreams.”
Give Yourself Space to Breathe
I know I mention this too many times, but most people don’t realize that this is a possibility. In the previous point, I mentioned that you have to plan for the long term and take it easy. Most likely, if you are in a situation similar to the one I was in, you want to run from your job and change your life tomorrow. A really good option is to start looking for a job that is less demanding. Even if you have to do the “same” kind of job, I did exactly that.
One day I was exhausted. My boss threw the blame for something I didn’t do at me. The company was going through a hard time, and my team was feeling the pressure. So when I got home, I updated my curriculum and looked for places where I could do a similar job for similar pay and work fewer hours. Now I’m working there, and from time to time, I want to run because, let’s be honest, I don’t want to do what I’m doing for a living, but it’s much more relaxed, and I have enough time to work on my escape plan, and at the same time, I have a job that is paying the bills.
So go out there and look for a better option. Probably someone else is willing to offer you a better deal.
Having Ways to Socialize
If you pay enough attention, you’ll notice that I mentioned that I have a girlfriend and that it’s a good idea to go to a coffee shop to do your things. That’s how I met my girlfriend; she was working there, and I was a regular customer because I was going there to code.
What I’m trying to share with this is that socializing doesn’t imply going to a club or a party. You can find ways to put yourself out there and at the same time keep doing your stuff. Anything that puts you close to other human beings and forces you to interact with other people is a good idea. We are extremely social beings, and it’s amazing how much our interpersonal relationships can affect our lives.
Having Your Escape Number
A good way to structure your plan is first to find your escape number. This is pretty easy. It varies a little bit from country to country because of the taxes, so I’ll just give you the concept, and later you can polish the number. It goes something like this: for one month, keep track of how much you need to pay for rent, your food, and everything else that you strictly need to live.
That’s your escape number. Find ways to produce that every month, and you are out.
Being Logical About the Future
When you are making decisions like this, it’s important to stay calm, control your emotions, and think as logically as you can about it. Let’s say you have your plan, you know what you truly want to do, how much time it’s going to take you, and how much money you need. Ok, now let’s be calm and realistic.
You need to save money and be prepared for it to fail. What are you going to do if everything goes wrong? In my case, I have enough savings to survive for three months. In the meantime, if everything fails, I’m looking for another job, and if I can’t get it in that time, I have enough money to go back to my parents’ house to start all over again. I know, I know, it’s easy for me to say—I’m just 21, and I don’t have children, but believe me, no one wants to fail.
Not Giving Yourself a Way to Fail
Normally, most people quit
before getting to the end. Have you ever noticed that your phone takes almost the same time to go from 80% to 100% as it does from 0% to 80%? That’s because the potential difference of the battery is going down the closer you get to 100%. We can extrapolate that to any project. What took you to go from 0% to 80% is probably the same amount of effort and time that you are going to need to go from 80% to 100%. So if you apply the same rules for both parts, it’s most likely that you are going to lose.
Then let’s change the rules. Let me give you another example. I love playing the piano, but I suck at it. So I started taking classes. I already want to quit, but I put a challenge to myself. I can only quit after 100 lessons. If I don’t want to play after 100 lessons, I’m more than free to quit. The thing is, I’m pretty sure that after the 100th lesson, I’ll want to play.
In that way, there is no way for me to lose because I changed the rules of the game, and just like a casino, the chance of the house losing is extremely low.
You Don’t Need to Do All of This
Finally, probably the best advice of all: you don’t need to do all of this. I would love to be rich, and I used to think that everybody wants to be rich. To my surprise, one day I decided to ask my cousin (I’m really close with my cousin). You know what he said? He said: “No Juan, I don’t want to be rich, I just want to be a medic and help people, I don’t care about that.” I replied: “But you understand that if you are not wealthy enough, you’ll have to work for the rest of your life under someone else’s desires and rules.” He answered: “I don’t care. I have no problem working for hours if I’m doing something good and productive that can be admired.” Finally, I asked: “Ok, that’s great. But then, how do you want to live?” His answer: “I just want to have enough time to be with my girlfriend, enough money to not worry about the bills, and some nice vacations and time for my children.” I think my cousin’s answer was beautiful.
Maybe you are more like my cousin. Just because everybody wants to be rich or because everybody wants to be an entrepreneur or a software developer doesn’t mean you have to do the same. So be free to decide what you think is better for yourself. Also, don’t repeat my mistake and don’t let others tell you what is worth doing and what’s not, and don’t let the circumstances of your surroundings determine what you are going to do, as if we were capable of predicting the future.
Wrapping Up
I hope you find this post useful. It has been an adventure for me to write about this. It’s something extremely personal, but I really wanted to share it. If you found it helpful, please leave me a comment telling me what’s going on with your life.
Before You Go
I’m thinking of posting on X. Would you follow me? Thank you in advance, and if you really enjoyed the post, would you help me pay my rent?
[—————————————————————————] 0% of $400, let’s pay my rent
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