If I’m honest, under all this I struggle to get out of bed in the morning. I have a technically fun job (at least it would be without all the tech debt and no time to fix it), but it’s in the gambling industry. I don’t feel like my work matters, it’s all very meh. But I need the money to live, so I push past my dissatisfaction because the better jobs don’t pay.
When I get home I have no energy. My home life is suffering and I feel like I’m drowning in my job.
Needing some words of encouragement. What have other people done in my situation?
First, I would start looking for a new job. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Second, I would snowball my tasks. I would start with the smallest, complete it, and then start the next one. You need to build some momentum.
Third, I would enforce a personal WIP limit. When you ship something, grab something new.
These are all pretty work related, so I will add one more thing. No job is worth your life. If you feel bad at a place, focus on your home life and find a new job.
You're not getting any younger and burning your remaining time on the face of the planet on someone else's endless backlog that doesn't generate new marketable skills.
It sounds like you need encouragement not to get better at ignoring your morale is tanked due to correctly assessing the source of your problems but to change your path to something less grinding.
The jobs that pay a premium do it because they have to in order to abuse you into doing things that are not in your interests.
Do those younger devs truly get stuff easily, or are they just vaguely familiar with more npm libraries than you, because they were studying that instead of focusing on deep fundamentals? Maybe you're every bit as good as them and they're just lazy and cheating, or happen to be specialists in specific things you're not?
Or perhaps they're just well rested because they don't have a life. I've been that!
I've solved years old bugs before, some might think I'm one of those devs you're talking about, but I have no clue what actually happened with some of them.
Performance doesn't matter on this algorithm that only executes once at startup? Rip it out and use a brute force thing. I'm not even gonna pretend to know enough math to fix it.
Hand soldered thing on proto board with logic gates got messed up? I kind of feel bad, but I'm going to put it in the junk drawer, replace it with an Arduino, and be done with it.
No matter how smart you are, I can still not do something faster than you can do it.
The most capable people always seem to make things harder for themselves, by taking "Pride in your work" a bit too far, well past what actually helps the product, especially with mental stuff, where there's curiosity, pride, desire to develop new skills, and all kinds of things leading one to make stuff harder.
Worse, there's even inertia, where someone might spend 3 hours debugging with print statements rather than exploring a different IDE with a debugger, or write something themselves without any research on how others did it.
Perhaps that is how they got to be the most capable people, by never turning down a challenge, but if they're gonna keep doing that, maybe they should go where their efforts are appreciated, maybe doing something novel that can't be done by the rest of us boot camp copypaste masters..
A 'better job' is not necessarily a high-paying job. Many people opt for lower commute time yet choose a lesser paying job, if it means they don't spend 1-2 hours commuting. Also if you're lucky, you live where you work, and have plenty of amenities available (Gym, Shopping Center etc).
Also you could need a side-project / hobby project you work on that is either related to tech or not related (wood working etc). Many people scratch their own itch on hobby projects even if they're not paid to do it (they just enjoy doing it).