I'm quitting

I have a bit of an announcement to make. I quit my job today. For the last two years, I've basically been in an ever increasing spiral of depression over the fact that I hated my job and had grown to hate the menial work of programming that pretty much consists of 80% of all work in this industry. I jumped around on projects and new jobs trying to deny it, to find some kind of secret sauce that would fix it all ("Maybe I just need a different environment, maybe I need to get away from this shitty code base."), and it only served to make me want to wall myself in my room and never come out again.

So I quit. I'm probably going to quit programming for a living. I haven't had any fun programming in the last 3 years because I've been too caught up with programming for work that when I get home I'm spent. Back in September of 2010 I started a project that should have taken me 2 months. Three years ago, I would have rushed home from work and worked on such a project until 2 in the morning. It's still not done and the fact that I haven't been able to do that is a serious canary in the mineshaft in terms of my ability to perform in this field. I like to think that I'm a person capable of keeping promises, so I gotta push through the burnout and just get that project done stuff done. Conveniently, I've suddenly have a lot of time on my hands.

I've got enough cash to get by for a few months without needing to have any income, and then my lease runs out on my apartment, I'll cancel my internet and utilities, and my cash requirements plummet dramatically. I'm not in as good of a debt position as I would have liked by this point, but that's yet another symptom of what I've been doing (or rather, not doing) for the last 2 years.

I don't really know what I'm going to do long-term. I might end up flipping burgers, or I might end up a freelance photographer. Part of the whole point is to reassess my life decisions and come up with a plan that keeps me from getting burnt out like this again. Now seems like a good time to get a bunch of loan proposals done for different business ideas that have been sitting on the back burner for the last 3 years. Grad school applications suddenly seem feasible.