I hate programming as a job. Spending all day sitting at a computer with little human interaction outside of the person next to me and having to concentrate for hours on hard problems is really bad for my mental health. Most programmers seem to either burn out, or spend their day trying to avoid programming by going to meetings and so on.
There is also an extreme amount of micromanagement at my current job. I just get very specific issues and then resolve them. There is no autonomy. The project manager just sees me as a typewriter for his novel.
Jobs where I have been physically active and interacted with a bunch of different people that I don't work with have been much better in terms of my mental and physical health.
I am thinking of dropping down to part-time as I could manage 4 hours per day of programming, and maybe getting a physical job as the other 4 hours.
My father never really retired, he just took longer breaks between shorter jobs. In between he toured national parks.
Obviously for financial/economic system reasons this isn't open to people anymore, think of the cost of medical insurance or cost of real estate, it was much easier to be independently wealthy in the 80s/90s (for a small enough value of wealthy of course). But something similar could probably still be arranged today, somehow.
Another thing to think about is not all programming jobs are excruciatingly boring. Boring jobs should pay a substantial premium to be staffed such that you can afford mental health vacations each weekend of arbitrary expense, to recover.
Also in my starving student days I worked some physical labor jobs that were as excruciatingly boring as your description implies for programming. You feel physically better and more energized if you move more, but you'll be just as mentally bored.
Sounds like you'd be much happier at a place like Bloomberg, where there's just a big open room and a lot of noise and zero privacy and lots of talking and "teamwork".
There's no shortage of workplaces like this. Go apply for new jobs and look for ones that use "Agile" and have "open-plan offices".
I'd love to have a programming job where I have little human interaction and have to concentrate for hours. Those jobs are very rare these days thanks to the open-plan office.
