Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

I'm a weirdo: I've been doing web dev since the 90s and made a very conscious decision NOT to go into the tech industry, primarily for my own happiness.

It sounds like what you've liked in your previous jobs are the ability to learn, and that your current goals aren't scratching that itch. I'm the same way: If I'm not learning and challenging myself intellectually on a regular basis, I end up depressed. Which isn't something society is very well set up for in my experience.

There are a couple of ways to proceed:

1.) Try to focus on career paths that allow you to learn/be happy. Going into research, returning to working at startups and accepting the stability limitations, etc. To do this, you want to look for positions where you learning directly helps the company. That way your interests are aligned.

2.) Decouple your intellectual life/happiness from your career path; whether this is possible depends on how much work demands from you. This is mostly what I do: I only work 20-30 hours a week in a non-tech job, so I have time to build terrible tech projects in my spare time + no pressure to learn or build for the sake of my career. I can just do whatever I want. It's very freeing, but of course, this has its downsides as well: I'm not well integrated into the tech community, for example.

Also consider that some of the stress may stem from your reliance on your career as well: Any situation where a single mistake/firing has devastating consequences results in stress. Minimizing this would involve building incomes, networks, etc. so you have a safety net.

Sedentarism, I can't help you, I'm reading the advice along with you, but that's my advice for happiness as somebody who prioritized doing work I like + makes the world better over money.

> talking with a lot of people lets them see patterns an individual can't

This is a really nice distillation of the value of talking to a therapist. I really appreciate this comment.

IME working less itself doesn't solve the problem, it's more about how you organize your time. I had free Fridays and I would still end up sitting in front of computer all Friday, just doing something else not work... and back when I was freelancing "because that way I can work from anywhere", I've still spent like 99% of days sitting in my home office. In order to change the lifestyle one needs a bit of self-discipline to actually use the chances that they have instead of falling for the routine. If you don't want to live a sedentary lifestyle that just come up with things you can do to change it, like use a standing desk, make small breaks during the day to exercise, go to gym after work. Sticking to it is far harder than finding the time to do it.

The idea has crossed my mind before, so I'm quite interested to find someone doing it. What line of work are you in?

I have found that for me, the biggest boost to happiness is the ability to say no to things I don't want to do.

I truly enjoy working in tech, but not on every project. At first I was worried that I wouldn't find enough new projects, but now looking back, I never had much downtime after I started being much more selective. It's just that instead of SQL / Excel stuff, I now work on real time audio video processing, AI and robotics. And that makes me happy :)

Plus recently, a friend and me have been wasting a lot of time on the Gocoder Bomberland competition. Both the social aspect and the immediate feedback of video game development make that really enjoyable.