Ask me anything.

Not in your building. That was the thing it took me too long to accept.

Almost certainly not, but you will not be able to see what those years bought you until you need it.

By making the comparison specific enough to act on, or dropping it entirely. The vague version has no use at all.

Because you are seeing their announcements and living your process, and those two things were never comparable.

It is worth more now than at any previous point in your career, and that is not encouragement — it is how the market currently works.

One narrow, repeatable task that somebody currently does by hand and resents.

It will take parts of it, and the parts it takes are probably the parts you like least.

No, and the people hiring you care about it considerably less than the people around you do.

Yes, and the route is through what you already know rather than around it.

Stop looking for meaningful work and start looking for a problem that irritates you enough to keep showing up.

Not yet — but set a date, and make the next eight months extractive rather than endured.

Do the boring middle for six months with nobody watching. A mood will not survive it. A passion barely notices.

Take the money, and use it to buy the time to test the passion cheaply. Those are not opposites unless you make them opposites.

Not with your resume. Begin with the fact that nineteen years of institutional knowledge did not disappear on Friday.

Nothing. You are comparing your inside to their outside, and their outside is a curated object.

You do not need runway. You need one paid thing inside ninety days, and the difference between those two ideas is the difference between planning and moving.

Something ended. That is not the same as it being over, and the confusion between those two things is where most of the pain lives.

Completely is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Most successful changes are not complete — they are a pivot on something you already have.

No. And at 50 you have something a 25-year-old does not: you can tell which problems are worth solving.