I quit my job last March and it was a bad idea.

Remember that depression is just a chemical imbalance in your brain that's making you think your an idiot. Dont identify with it, and please talk to somebody in real life about this, HN will be of limited help here.

HN is a VERY VERY skewed view of the world, remember your hearing mostly just the success storys of the best of the best in this field, so dont judge yourself so harshley.

Best of luck anyway and please please talk to somebody about this in person.

It sucks to read this, but I have a very similar experience to this. I quit my job after 2 years because I was ready to strike out on my own and try my hand at a startup. I failed almost instantly. I have spent the last 2 years struggling because I wasn't able to get my business going, and I didn't qualify for unemployment. The worst part was the company went under 5 months later and had I held on, I would have had 99 weeks of unemployment to use to get my idea off the ground. In my life I can count the number of regrets I have, but that is without a doubt the biggest one.

one thing i noticed over the years... when i was "down" or my business wasn't going really well (being a freelancer at some point in time) my actual product wasn't that good.

i was basically not delivering quality, so my customers weren't happy and i had to realize that i should call in someone else to help finish assignments. i had to change my position and my title.

when you work as an employee, you may just be fine for that job, being a freelancer or a company owner, you have to produce exceptional quality, and you may still be in trouble collecting payments in time...

so it is very important to know yourself and your skills before making a decision.

try figure out what you're good at, and until you do, you can still help out here or there for some coins or food.

let me know if you need ideas...

>...apparently I'm destined to slave away at C++ legacy code all my life. Which is really what depresses me.

Well, there's another difficult lesson there - there's no such thing as 'destiny', however much it may feel that way sometimes. Many people willingly or unwillingly follow the random wind of fate and think of it as destiny but it is just the nature of life that 'things happen'.

The good news is that knowing this frees you up somewhat - your life is yours to control. The trick is working out what you want (and you apparently have some idea now, more than most 20 year-olds) and then what steps you need to take to get there.

Some suggestions:

1) Beware the myth of the overnight success - getting where you want to go in life almost always involves many incremental steps and lots of work, yet we are surrounded by stories of companies and individuals who hit the jackpot and found success instantly. In reality that almost never happens and what we usually don't hear about are the years of trial-and-error and effort that went into building that success.

2) If C++ is your strength, perhaps you could find a way to use that to finance the transition? In the short-term, another coding job could give you the money to pay for art/design training and help you move into the career you really want. The key here is to get the best out of your free time. This is one way to avoid the 'fate' that you fear - use the lemons you have to make the lemonade you want.

3) As some other people have said, tell us what you can do and what you've been working on, and perhaps someone here will be able to offer you some freelance work to help with your cashflow.

Sorry to hear that your Dad and your friends are being so unhelpful. All I can offer there is one of the great 'aha!' moments in my life so far - when people are being persistently unpleasant to you, it almost always reflects insecurities that they hold about themselves, rather than something you've done wrong per se. You've come to a difficult point in your life and throwing blame or sarcasm around does nothing to change that, only appeases their demons for a short while. I don't know if that helps at all but it helped me to realise that I wasn't to blame for other peoples' anger - we all make mistakes and have difficult times but the constructive thing to do is to find a way deal with them and move forward, not wallow in the problems we perceive others have visited upon us (I'm referring still to your father and friends, not to you).

Enough rambling; I hope that helps and wish you the best of luck in the future.

To some degree it's part of being 20 - people at 20 rarely put as much thought as needed in to any life decision - it's part of the growing process. You'll be sure to put more thought in to future decisions, and you'll be better off for it.

A lot of the "I quit my job!" stories we read on HN are people quitting to move on to something better, usually that's already lined up. You were quitting more to get away from something bad. Both are valid reasons, but your move was riskier without a new destination plan in place already. That's all - you're not a loser because of this decision.

It is painful, but you'll get through this somehow. If you ever feel like talking, shoot me an email at mgkimsal@gmail.com or hit me up at 919.827.4724. I've been in deeper situations than you, looking much more stupid and with far more zeros involved, and it certainly does get better.