From the article --
In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”Because I spent my career working in tech in the Bay Area there are some things that I just think of as 'normal' that other people, without that exposure, are surprised by. During the last 40 years start ups and tech companies have minted tens of thousands of millionaires across a wide distribution of 'net worth just over a million dollars' to 'net worth of tens of millions'. The largest chunk of that cohort leave tech directly and go do 'fun' work. The smallest chunk of that cohort are still working for someone else trying to get a bigger score. What I realized was the most people aren't sociopathic wannabe billionaires. They don't get headlines, they don't show up "out of place", they are just the people who are living their lives doing things that matter to them.
So when the author is on about 'sharing the dream of doing what you want' I was like, "Yup, same as it ever was." The author also does not appear to have the benefit of having been in the area when semiconductor manufacturing became 'foundries' and all the process engineers and other workers in all of the small fabs in the SF Bay Area were now displaced. That was a class of workers who lost faith in their careers. But what was true then, and is true today, in the US we take kids out of High School and spend four years teaching them how to think and generally how to think about some topic in college and then they go out and get jobs. For someone who has been through college, getting a new Bachelor's degree in an entirely new subject takes two and a half years tops. You don't need the general ed, if its another STEM topic you don't need to redo the math, its just "lets take the classes that are specific to the major."
And before everyone jumps on this and says "But Chuck, now I've got a mortgage and responsibilities and I can't be taking a couple of years off just to go to school." Yeah I get it. That's especially true if you don't have a support network. So it sucks and is depressing and you don't want to even get out of bed because you feel like years of your life were just wasted and now you need to start over. The alternative though just gets you deeper and deeper into a hole.