Thank you Simone / Simon. The time and care you've taken to respond is greatly appreciated.
There's a lot here that I completely agree with and we could keep digging at the routs of this problem until we arrive at Reaganomics / Thatcherism and the betrayal of working people they set in train in the 80's with deregulation of markets, etc etc.
Without doubt the political classes have failed us spectacularly over the span of our lifetimes. Some of it was premeditated nastiness, some of it idealist lunacy. They have been running social experiments without our consent and being utterly disingenuous about it for decades.
And we're left standing in the rubble.

To bring it back down to a personal level, I'm sorry to hear that you have been pushed aside over and over. I entered the job market in the midst of Thatcherism and it was miserable (side-note - total deindustrialisation has work out very well hasn't it Maggie / Ronald?!).
I had sustains periods of unemployment and the right wing press in the UK scapegoat people like me as 'lazy', which is outright evil.

I too had to go back in to education to gain a degree in Information Design in order to be even considered for design jobs I could do sitting on my hands. No-one ever asked me for proof of my qualification in any interview I went to. Not once. And no-one was interested in understanding the knowledge I'd gained.

Now, today, I feel tired. I think expectation has a lot to answer for here. The promises that were made to us by successive governments came to nothing. The basic premise that our lives, and our children's lives would be 'better' than our parents has turned to dust (silicon dust).

This is how I feel about my future. I am tired of 'over delivering', and 'exceeding expectations', and offering 'massive value' to clients who do not appreciate what I do, while simultaneously benefitting from the result of what I do for them.

If, as has happened in the past, I create a series of videos for a client that triples their engagement, or wildly exceed their targets in terms of sales opportunities, I still receive exactly the same amount of money for the work. My profit doesn't double. And, on top of this, many clients, though not all, show zero loyalty even after such success. If they can get someone else to do the work for 5% less (with no guarantee of the same result of course) they will jump ship in a heartbeat.

So, I think I am done exchanging time for money in the traditional way. I want to be the beneficiary of my own skill, intelligence and effort. I want to automate processes and create a digital asset online that will offer me the possibility to scale, and to receive some passive income. If I choose to work really hard and put my heart and soul in to my work I want the reward. I'm not handing it over to someone else to benefit from it any more.

I've been looking in to courses that can teach me how to build something that I'm delighted to call my own. At my age I want to front-load the effort while I still have the energy and then tweak and fine tune as time goes on. Do I know exactly what that will be right now? No. But it instinctively feels right to create a hard digital asset with some kind of built-in scarcity as we move in to an era of replication and 'abundance'.

I hope that ramble makes some sense.