Comment by notaustinpowers

I'm in a similar boat to you, and it's made me think a lot more about happiness and, I think this is something we may not think too much about, how our life affects our receptiveness to happiness. I'll try to explain what's helped me, and hopefully it can help you too.

There's that old phrase that happiness is a journey, not a destination. It's a state of being, a fleeting emotion. We each have our own unique flavor of happiness, but modern life is about efficiency, reproducible results, one-size fits all. It's led us to seek happiness from external sources like consumption and entertainment, that happiness is our every waking desire being met immediately. We've commodified happiness in these externalities.

What's helped me is to view my life as a garden, crafted to grow what makes me happy. Thoughtfulness, constant learning, whimsy, and slowness are some of the aspects of life that make me happy. These aren't things I do, not something I can buy, these are aspects that I find bring more happiness into my life.

Now, it's my duty to nurture these aspects of life that bring me happiness. I nurture thoughtfulness by protecting time for me to think uninterrupted and reducing compulsivity to respond to everything. I nurture constant learning by ensuring my learning is fueled by curiosity, not this anxiety of self-improvement, and that growth is expansive, not corrective. I nurture whimsy by being a little unnecessary and slightly impractical (hand-writing in a journal rather than in an app, taking small walks through a new place, not focusing on efficiency in everything). And I nurture slowness by designing friction into my life. Using analog tools, longer timelines, giving myself space to breathe through things. I schedule in slowness otherwise it gets crowded out by everything else going on.

I think you may enjoy taking some time to think about what aspects of life you appreciate and bring you happiness, find out how to nurture those aspects, and then craft your life around that. It could shed some light or help bring into perspective what your next steps should be.