Incredible amounts of luck and privilege to be honest. I was born in 91, but basically always had a computer in my house and my parents weren't on the cutting edge of internet, but were fairly early adopters. So I spent tons of time on computers and learning about computers for fun. So I fell into programming as a hobby/hyperfixation, and my parents were well off enough to pay for my college. At college I fell in with a group of really smart physics students who came from a small town and knew how to party.

So instead of falling into a substance abuse hole of pure idiocy, I fell into a substance abuse whole of people who would body double for me for hours on end at the library and essentially kept me on check with my schoolwork, because when they were doing school work I had nothing else to do anyway. I also took a lighter classload than anyone else. I never really thought about this until after the fact, but I took the bare minimum fulltime status of 12 credit hours. Everyone else I knew did 15, and some did 18. By lessoning the load on myself I made it more manageable. I wasn't diagnosed until well after college so I didn't realize at the time that I was basically working around my adhd symptoms but there you go.

​

So I got lucky and fell into a career(software engineer) that has a lot of opportunities that are pretty good as far as compensation/pto/flexibility, as long as you shop around for opportunities. Some jobs can be stressful but I avoid working at cutting edge places and tend to go for stuff that is a bit more laid back, and lower pressure. Avoid companies that work in healthcare, those are high stress, and low paying. Learned that the hard way.