Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months.

My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.

It's very possible in 2 or 3 years there won't be much of a job market remaining and the best thing you can do now is something you own.

If you don't need to support a family and are unhappy otherwise, why not?

Sure it's not 'the smart thing to do' but if it makes you happy and you're still not far worse of than most people...

Feels like an unfair judgment of someone else's values, which have no obligation to match yours.

Definitely not my first rodeo, but feel free to gloat.

They didn't say that they are retiring, just that they are ending their career as a software engineer.

1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space

2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy.

Processes just export a

    void handle(void *cap_private_state, msg_t message)

entrypoint instead of a main function. I just want to see where I can take this idea.

Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years.

All this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.