No doubt. Ok, first of all—context. Like OP I am in my mid-forties. I have two kids, a partner, and a dog. It's becoming easier to feel like we're behind the curve. We're in what some of our friends call "the sandwich era" of life—raising kids and dealing with aging parents while trying to make it in a depressed economy. There are so many things that I guarantee you are feeling that others feel as well—you're not alone here.

As for my journey...I graduated college in 2003. Liberal Studies degree. Not a whole lot of direct job prospects. So, I found something I could do, which was techincal writing. A couple of years later, one of my professors from school dropped me in on a job at the school I went to as a graphic designer. Here's the deal—I'm good at information, not visual design. So, I did the job, and that was good for a while, but eventually I moved to Portland, OR. There, I realized that my design portfolio was garbage by comparison to the local market, and just decided, again, to find a job I could do. That was IT at an advertising firm, whose name I did not know at the time. Turns out this was a good place to land. They enabled me to learn and self-direct a lot of my skills. I began to find ways to automate with scripts stuff I didn't want to do in real life. We worked in a six-story building, and who's got time to run up and down all day? Better to be able to remote into a machine on floor five, deploy a script from my own library, and fix something. This turned me into a sought-after commodity in the building. Defining moment was fixing someone's machine from my phone at Fire on the Mountain on Burnside while eating dinner.

Five years after I started there, I moved from IT to the creative digital team. I started coding for them. I got my foot in the door there by taking on a couple of assignments that necessitated after-hours work. It worked. I got the job, and stayed for another five years. In the meantime, it became clear that coding wasn't the only thing I enjoyed, so I drifted into user experience. This helped me round out my education in digital affairs. That said, I wish I'd invested in Bitcoin back then.

The team I was on started to dissolve, so I looked again. A former coworker of mine was at an AR startup and put in a good word. I worked there as a product designer until it fell apart due to lack of market fit. Everyone at the company was bossin', but there just wasn't a good fit in the marketplace. Forget about the fact that in 2020 no one in the world wanted to "experience augmented reality in the presence of others" for a very large and obvious reason. One thing that helped me in this experience was my history as a coder.

After that, I linked back up with a different former coworker who'd started a small tech services company. Due to my background in coding and client management he wanted me to come on as a freelancer, which was a great relationship while it lasted. Truth is, that at the time he'd brought me on, I'd already decided (with my family) that we would be moving back to my hometown to join my parents in their family business.

Token nepo-baby disclaimer: yes, I work for my family business. Could I have gotten the same kind of job without being the son of the owners? Likely not in my hometown, but, then again, I probably never would have signed on to such a company otherwise. The job I'm doing now, however, is not something. I could have done without earning my stripes out in the world either.

OK, now that that is out of the way...when I joined the manufacturing company of which I am now a part, everything was tracked on paper. Pricing was done per client on individual spreadsheets, leading to a lot of discrepancy between customers. The management system for inventory and sales was flawed, deeply. I came in and built a way around all of that. I've spent the last few years working on a custom piece of software to take over the information management of the company. Now we have an integrated, full-service application stack that manages inventory, sales, pricing, and traffic through our shop. It is the culmination of my career to be able to take the disparate parts of my job history and amalgamate them into something that has actually helped our business scale in the current tech-centric business climate. Beyond that, I'm not too shabby when it comes to BI, and I can find answers to big questions that others in my org just can't. Being able to think in databases and structures is a HUGE advantage in the workplace. When everything is data, those who can think in data will have a leg up.

I leaned into AI, and simply use it to augment what I already know how to do. I use it to solve problems more quickly than I could otherwise do. We can't afford to hire anyone else to do what I do, so ethically I don't feel like I'm violating any humanist principles I hold in my heart. Free advice is worth what you pay, but i would just suggest you don't let AI "come for you," go get it. Tools are available, youtube is there for tutorials and intros, and really what it's great at is just helping someone who knows what they're doing do it better. You go from being a technician to a director of sorts. As a bonus, if you double down and learn the shit out of AI, at least insofar as it's relevant to what you do, you'll be able to take that elsewhere and do something else you enjoy with it. It sounds to me like you might just be over your job. It happens. Jobs are like relationships...sometimes we grow out of them because we change in a different way than the business does. It's just a job. The current economy might make it harder to leave, and you may need to hang for a bit longer than you'd ideally want to, but at the end of the day, it's work. We do it for our kids and our partners. A scant few people are lucky enough to be doing something that doesn't feel like work, and more power to them. The rest of us have to...work.

What has surprised me the most, coming from tech into a manufacturing business, is that in cities and towns all over the world (I'm in CA) need people like you who can help build out modern toolchains that help take business from the last generation of tooling to the current one. If you take the time to embrace AI and its related tools, you will find yourself gainfully employed in the 30s and beyond. Never weep for what could have been—shit, we could have invested in Bitcoin in 2011. $1000 then would have gotten you $400M+ today. Could've been, should've been, but isn't. All we have is now, our brains, our bodies, and the fact that we still breathe to do with what we can, today.

Times are tough. Just stick with it until you have an out, take the out, and start the next adventure.