Like many people I've been sad about the loss of a career I spent years developing skills in and I'm 55 now and won't be quickly retraining for another high paying career. Fortunately I do have other skills I developed earlier in life and low needs so will probably limp by fine but it's still a painful adjustment.

Point being, you could always write code as an older person. Well, back in the old days when we wrote code anyway.

There are groups that would love to be in full control of visible information and parents rightly concerned about social media use by kids.

I just give an LLM a list of files, a set of steps and timestamps, a directory to work in and have it write a bash script that calls ffmpeg. I just view the source videos with VLC and get the timestamps I want.

I mostly use this to edit my YouTube videos and this really beats importing files, dragging things around and all that and it only takes a few minutes to edit now.

Initially I was lonely occasionally during the day but it went away. I'm now perfectly comfortable with no human contact except comments (like this) on the internet for very long stretches. My girlfriend went on a 3 week trip to visit family last year and I visited town twice and saw a friend once during that time and had one long phone conversation with a brother. It was a perfectly comfortable 3 weeks. I don't play video games.

I'm not recommending this way of life. It's probably more psychologically healthy to have people around and so I have to recommend trying to rebuild social connections as you can, but the point is for your situation, it gets much more comfortable as time passes. I don't want to say "it's all in your head" but something along the lines of that sentiment is kind of how it works I think. You do need something to do, a reason to get up in the morning. I garden and keep animals.

"Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.

I've been playing with various mineral amendments for years and produce some extremely tasty produce I have yet to see matched in stores (even the organic section).

It seriously got me laughing. Thanks.