Loved my job for the past 40 years. Taught myself programming, always keeping an eye on preparing for jobs that most other programmers would find difficult but that I also liked. Started with games, went to embedded, then compilers, then PM, then started a good business, now retired but working on static site generator.
Proposed my strategy to my wife before we got married. I only took jobs that I would enjoy, and didn’t worry about the money much. She is a far better programmer than I am, but didn’t particularly like it. We both knew if both of us worked, we would just come home and complain to each other. She was very happy as a housewife.
Since they were programming jobs, they always paid pretty well, but not amazingly well due to my strategy of choosing places, I would enjoy working. I first chose to work in Orange County California, instead of Silicon Valley, for example, because I always felt the latter was just too stressful. Eventually moved to the Seattle area when Microsoft offered a job.
For the first 20 years I always made sure I was close enough to work that I could walk or bike to it in case I somehow got poor and couldn’t afford a car. Yet we always found very nice apartments.
I always studied for my next job at night. my wife accepted that this was the cost of having a good life, and eventually when we had children, I had a good enough financial situation that I could quit work.
We always saved money for the same reason: if I were fired, I wouldn’t have to take a bad job due to lack of resources. I did get fired once, and I had plenty of time to prepare for the next job.
I’ve told this story a lot here, but it was a strategy that worked in both good times and bad. I immodestly think this was one of the smartest things I ever did.