Ask HN: I'm in a humiliating situation, and I can't commit

Like a lot of people, I was raised by boomer parents with attachment disorders (NPD dad and BPD mom). Treated like an object, so I never felt real, did not develop a sense of agency like most people. Which led to me not knowing what to do most of life. In college I said fuck it, went into a major that I knew paid money, but that I had no real care for.

Long story short, I am 34, I have saved ~2 million in the bank. Recently to change my life, I moved to NYC to try to force myself to take action (I left my original job of 8.5 years to start a new life). I have an engineering degree, but it's not CS (and not from an Ivy).

I have not worked in 3 years. I spent a lot of this time reading all of the entrepreneur material out there, fixing my psychological issues (mostly cognitive distortions due to faulty 'programming' from early life- midbrain stuff). And unfortunately I also did quite a bit of hardcore gaming (mostly due to hopelessness/depression). I pushed myself to top 10 on wow and hearthstone, and I considered streaming, but I knew that long term, I wouldn't be intellectually satisfied with just doing that.

Since I seem to share values with a lot of the tech community and founders, I thought I should teach myself programming and start a business in that field, but there are so many directions to go, it doesn't seem practical to learn them all. Do you learn JS, do you learn mobile, should I try to become as good as an engineer that works for GOOG etc... Should I just say fuck it and become a physicist or quant and go into finance. I don't know, but I need to take action, and for some reason I cannot decide. I think part of it is also facing the humiliation of working with much younger people and them looking at me like 'holy shit, I'm glad I'm not that guy'.

You're telling yourself a lot of things. You're also comparing other people's highlight reels to your backstage. You're much more normal than you think. You do seem to have a barrier that once broken will be gone forever. Usually it's achieved by meeting someone special or experiencing something special which will make you go "whatever I thought all my life is irrelevant right now because I'm enjoying this so much."

Stop planning and researching. Go outside and get in trouble.

If you were in my shoes, how would you go about 'go outside and get in trouble?'. I'm just not quite sure what to do.

It looks like my post was removed from the ask section. Is there a reason why?

You deserve a compliment for saving $2m. As DrScump & icedchai suggest you do HAVE some easy options.

From your narrative, I get the impression that you have not received professional therapy. If that is the case, then you should really get some competent help. A dependancy on gaming is not a good sign.

Here's my take: You have a professional degree and are able to earn a good income (as your savings attest) you could do worse than continue with your established professional career. You could then develop some outside of work interests that bring you satisfaction.

Entrepreneurship, especially in programming related tech has very little chance of success, something like 0.1%. Perhaps there is some way of using your professional experience to solve a real world problem or a problem in your profession that can be solved by some software solution.