Thats an unknown, unknown.

Not a therapist, but would probably switch my life with yours in a second. I am the same age as you, in tech in a third world country and working two jobs and eighty hours a week to afford a good future for my kids. I will have to probably keep doing so into my fifties to give them a good education. Bottom line, it might be a matter of perspective.

It must be hard to do what you are doing. One-upping OP on hardship does not help him deal with his situation. Suffering is subjective and depends on your ‘baseline ‘ - which is hard to override.

Wondrium/The Great Courses has a number of good quality courses on Anthropology taught by renowned professors from the US. I have a subscription and a passing interest in anthropology that has been satisfied by the above. YMMV.

Only Mexico adjoins the US southern border. But the US still has to deal with migration from all of central/south America.

Look carefully at the map, at the extreme top of India :) Even though it does not direct touch India, that region is as volatile as any other terrorist region. Lot of infiltration happens from that area into India.

In my experience a better question would have been. "Have you worked hard on something that DID pay off???" Most of the things that we work hard on never pay off except in terms of learned lessons.

We hear these stories all the time. The inverse is more interesting to be honest, as I feel a lot of people think working hard = success.

Draw.io/diagrams.net

I am working as an architect with about 17+ years of experience and i feel the same. However it would still be prudent to practice as mentioned in one of the comments. Things seem easier if tackled before. Your task should be to create the time and the motivation for regular practice.

If you want a broad overview of how RDBMS work under the hood, "Designing Data Intensive Applications", would be a good conceptual start.

This could be followed by database internals books like "Expert Oracle Database Architecture" and "Pro SQL Server Internals", irrespective of whether you use these databases or not, you will learn a ton of stuff about database internals and system design.

If you are interested in database schema design etc, then look up "The Database Model Resource Book" Volumes 1,2,3. None of the above are quick reads but they are solid foundations for becoming a well rounded DBMS professional.

I go for a short walk at the end of every hour. I have found my fitbit pretty useful in reminding me to do at least 250 steps every hour. The number might be small but i usually end up doing more than that once i get going.

What about time to learn? I am one of those older average devs stuck in small scale design and development tasks that start to feel like a burden when you are on the wrong side of 40s. Time or lack of it seems a bigger factor right now as compared to the points mentioned in the article. Finding time to learn something new while fulfilling one's responsibilities in life while trying to desperately hold on to the current job feels overwhelming. Time management in short might be more useful than all the other things combined. Or maybe i am just an old geezer.

Well, Indeed I agree: It is quite challenging to balance learning, life, and career development. Actually, I am planning to write a specific article on this - How to properly choose and learn technologies. I have an article on time management you might like https://www.cognitiveosman.com/few-tips-and-tricks-you-are-m...