Title: I&#x27;m 34. I work in quant finance in London, UK (in ML&#x2F;statistics). I graduated with a PhD in CS and sort of fell into this field when a recruiter contacted me with the promise of $$$ that is hard to get in any other field unless you&#x27;re at Google. I&#x27;m on a pretty decent salary even by London standards, but I&#x27;m utterly miserable.<p>1. The job is meaningless. When I first started in the field I thought I enjoyed it, but now I see that the bonuses were what excited me about the job, not the actual work.<p>2. Although the money is good, an &#x27;adequate&#x27; house in London would cost at least 10 times my salary. I&#x27;m renting a flat with my partner. It&#x27;s a reasonably decent flat by London standards, but because we&#x27;re renting we can never really make it a home.<p>3. London is a horrible place to live. I have no affinity for it whatsoever. Even if I could afford a house I would not want to live here.<p>4. My home town is an hour flight away but if I were to move home I would most likely take at least a 2&#x2F;3 pay cut. I would prefer to live back home. But doing that would ruin any chances I ever had of being able to retire early.<p>5. My parents, like most boomers, had a much better standard of living when they were my age. My father had a pretty average salary, bought a massive house for a reasonable price, and saw his wealth multiply many times over. It&#x27;s not like that for my generation.<p>My partner is in a similar job to me and he is making multiples of what I&#x27;m making (although it&#x27;s more stressful than mine). Luckily for him, he hates his job less than I do, so he could probably stick it out a few years longer.<p>I have just come back from 2 weeks holidays at home with my parents and was pretty much in tears this morning starting another day at work. It&#x27;s so hard to muster up any motivation for the job, especially now that the company is in a dry period pnl-wise. I much prefer my home town to London, but I can&#x27;t expect my partner to move back with me, as he is doing extremely well in his career and it would be career suicide for him.<p>I have racked my brain trying to figure out what field I would prefer to work in, but I can&#x27;t think of anything. I just go round in circles thinking about it. Given that anything else would involve a massive pay cut, I think I would regret leaving the job I&#x27;m in. I could probably grind leetcode for a couple of months to try to get into Google, but I would find working at Google utterly meaningless as well. I have the ability to work hard to pass an interview, but I&#x27;ve been working for long enough now that I find it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm during job interviews, which is probably a red flag for potential employers. I&#x27;m no longer young and excited about this stuff!<p>I&#x27;m interested in computers and programming in general, but doing it for a living ruins the joy. I would love to be able to retire and get into meditation &#x2F; travelling the world &#x2F; learning about things for fun.
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