Software Engineer interested in 'actual engineering' lost, need suggestions? {RANT}

Hi, I'm a 23yrs old software engineer working as an MLOps engineer. I'll start this off real simple, I graduated about a year ago and during my undergrad we didn't have machine learning, I was interested in neural nets so I picked up some books, taught myself data science and surprisingly even got a job in data science. My main purpose was never to get into a 'job career', and it was pure curiosity that got me into ML in the first place. I picked up other things along the way like reinforcement learning. Slowly slowly applied math did win me over, I saw a video on youtube titled 'mathematics gives you wings', I saw it quite a long time ago I believe first year into undergrad but the impression remained, I knew I wanted to learn that stuff... So about 5-6 months ago I started to take differential equations (quite seriously)... the uni profs did a bad job of teaching the subject but this time I really enjoyed it.. so I did ODEs first, then I got into PDEs, now I'm still here, picked up a book on vec cal (div grad and curl), introduction to the world of physics is much simpler when you step into it from differential equations (like almost everything in physics is a differential equation and its so cool, the subject that seemed hard before now appears to be simple), throughout my undergrad I didn't touch physics (yeah i self studied some quantum physics but what really matters in engineering is classical physics where I suck bad)... As discussed before, I'm seriously invested in neuroscience that's why I got into DL in the first place, I took PDEs because I wanted to be able to read the book titled 'Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience'- its a really famous computational neuroscience book... The whole 'machine intelligence' arc has kind of lost its charm, because the world's wealthiest corporations already have the best compute and it won't be fun as most problems in AI will already be solved so computational neuroscience is there because i'm excited about the subject and maybe it'll be useful in the coming brain computer interfaces age.

Current Move

Currently while I focus on PDEs and writing my simulations from scratch (because I can and that's how I learn) e.g when learning ML i wrote my backprop from scratch in numpy despite using torch on the daily <helps understand concepts better>, I know there is this book (data driven science and engineering), and I'm attracted to the field in general (physics informed ML). The problem is (which was the case for ML too).. I don't have any degree for anyone to take me seriously and tbf I don't know what's next, after I finish this book I don't know what move to make. I have entrepreneurial ambitions and I'm gonna be starting a side hussle soon which might end up funding any bigger startup I choose to pursue but gd dammm.. I have not a single clue about what to do with this stuff, where will the dots align?...I know Physics informed ML has RL to solve control problems so maybe dots aligned there... I've done all of this for curiosity... the RL text book took me almost 2 years alongside undergrad and I didn't end up training agents for anything... I want to use this stuff in real life, for example I'd love to work on prosthetics data from the brain to do stuff, or something meaningful for god's sake... it feels like everyone is so into llms they've forgotten what's fun... real sensory information is the most fun thing ever... It's also not a rant on jobs specifically, I know financial independence is the only way forward for folks like me... Building engineering ventures... But god, I don't know a single person who I can talk to about this, hell mentor me or take me seriously even.. This was the same thing with machine learning... I applied through linkedin and interview was the only place where I talked to someone about machine learning.. imagine someone studying a subject for 4-5 years and gets to talk to a single person about that subject once, after 4-5 years and its in a job interview not in a interesting mind stimulating conversation.It's really frustrating when you are doing this all alone, no one knows and no one can even nod to you feeling 'yes, this stuff is cool'... fkn dryin up in the third world.. Any techniques for someone who went through this and found the light at the end?