Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?

I really like selling drugs. I mean, I really like it. I spent 25 years coding, and I hated it. I hated the techbros who ruined the industry, I hated the dudebros who invaded every San Francisco coffee shop to talk loudly about their investments, and I really, really hated the way the tech crowd shifted from being kind of wild anarchist DIY hippy hackers to being right-wing law and order, thin-blue line types.

Now I produce sell Cannabis & Psychedelics in California where it's sort of legal. I have a huge social life, I've networked with dozens of other artisanal pushers, and now I can pickup like-minded girls and guys by saying "Hey, want to come back to my place and roll Molly or trip on shrooms?"

I make more than twice as much as I did as a backend developer, mostly in BitCoin and cash, and all I do is hang out with people. I haven't had a major depressive episode since my last day of work where I quite by sending him some scat porn and a video of me pissing on my work laptop.

I know some people who made millions working the Universal Service Fee system, getting paid gobs of subsidies to provide DSL / wifi to hillbillies in West Virginia. It's like digital gold if you know how to really work the system.

Hello! Great question.

The past year I’ve fallen in love with life. This has been a combo of a few things - I found work as a consultant where I get to share a unique perspective that when paired with the work of others produces outsized results.

I get paid moderately well by nearly a dozen clients but am the lowest paid team member on each team on a monthly basis - so I don’t feel too much pressure to deliver exceptional results all the time - and the number of clients I have means if I get 1 win a year for all clients I can have a true win each month professionally.

These wins and experiences make me feel like I’m growing and contributing.

Aside from that I’ve developed open and honest relationships with my lover and my friends and see them regularly and I live with housemates so I get my extraversion solved through work and natural interactions even in covid. The honest relationships with my lover and number and depth of friendships has allowed me to not hold any desires back from asking while having less pressure to be the doer of everything. Teams and ideas naturally form over time which has led to fun side projects and profit as well.

I prefer now to give perspective rather than advice but I’d say having a “deal centric” attitude and meeting a lot of people and trying to start things with them - usually based on some process that provides value so you have a process to lean on - seems pretty solid.

For instance building internal portals for small teams or organizations and taking a small ongoing fee to do it could help you. Instead of project based work with a time bound - low to moderate monthly fees with a variety of people can allow you to find creative energy where product management, analytics, etc can help other peoples visions come true over years.

You can see visions come to life without too much stress and avoid a single point of failure.

Happy Christmas and lmk if you’d like to work together on something like this.

You need to be bored. Long period of boredom.