So far it is working out pretty well for me. To be quite honest, you don't have to have passion for your job to perform well enough in accord with your salary and incentives. I'd say even more, overworking oneself is a "grave sin" against your future.
One's time and intelligence are better spent optimizing one's family size (in upwards direction) and health.
> I thought I was already doing that but looks like I've been doing something wrong with my professional career, and there is a path more equilibrated and focused on happiness I should follow.
Several things should be pretty evident by this point:
1. Software engineering sub-niches are grossly different in pay/effort ratio, overtime expectations and ageism prevalence
2. Overperforming expecting a raise is a poor strategy in most cases
3. Discrete option/bonus increase thresholds doled out according to perceived effort/visibility are a devious trick to lure a significant part of workers to invest more effort than they would otherwise (and still fail to get over the threshold to get the bonus). Don't fall for it.
And in any case: I think one of the most valuable things one can do is raise a big family, while investing into stock market and slowing down one's aging as much as possible, to reap all this compounding interest.
I do think that anti-natalist sentiment is very much overblown in the United States, while in the EU we don't see this position being claimed in public a lot. If by "screwed" you mean anthropogenic climate change, then by now it's pretty obvious that it will be mitigated via some form of geoengineering (see, for example recent guardian's popularizing take on it: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/30/geoengineering... )
To anyone who can look at the fertility curves and population pyramids, it should be pretty obvious that the real problem of the coming decades is demographic shift, and corresponding growth of dependency ratio. Compared to climate change, our authorities don't really propose a good solution for this crisis, except vague wording about more automation and more immigration (from the countries which, by they way, live through the same falling fertility curves).
If this reasoning still doesn't convice you, consider how hellish your own personal life is going be without grandchildren to take care of you. Western nursery homes staffed by min-wage workers speaking another language are not the place I'd wish for anyone to live in, but it's a de-facto place where grandparents of middle-class families are left to experience their final years.
In any case, I urge the readers to open the mentioned curves and statistical data and do the math to come to their own conclusion.
It's not just climate change, which is a runaway effect that is unlikely to be effectively mitigated by geoengineering without even worse side effects. I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.
It's global ecosystem collapse: grandparents, and eventually parents, will gladly die so that the children can eat.
There is no point in having savings or a pension, because the system that connects money to value is a dead man walking.
I live in The Netherlands and I have a child. I'm trying to figure out how to waterproof the bottom half of my house.
So far it is working out pretty well for me. To be quite honest, you don't have to have passion for your job to perform well enough in accord with your salary and incentives. I'd say even more, overworking oneself is a "grave sin" against your future.
One's time and intelligence are better spent optimizing one's family size (in upwards direction) and health.
> I thought I was already doing that but looks like I've been doing something wrong with my professional career, and there is a path more equilibrated and focused on happiness I should follow.
In addition to my advice, I recommend you to read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125
Several things should be pretty evident by this point:
1. Software engineering sub-niches are grossly different in pay/effort ratio, overtime expectations and ageism prevalence
2. Overperforming expecting a raise is a poor strategy in most cases
3. Discrete option/bonus increase thresholds doled out according to perceived effort/visibility are a devious trick to lure a significant part of workers to invest more effort than they would otherwise (and still fail to get over the threshold to get the bonus). Don't fall for it.
And in any case: I think one of the most valuable things one can do is raise a big family, while investing into stock market and slowing down one's aging as much as possible, to reap all this compounding interest.