I nearly ended up a pancake when my steering failed heading into a turn in February, the day before my birthday. I realized the circumstances that led to me not being able to fix it before it led to near disaster weren't going to change on the path I was heading down largely by habit, so I finally set some priorities.

I decided to focus on making a business out of music. I'm far from where I want to be, but it's been a long time since I was doing Mechanical Turk tasks to pay for junk food. I have savings, my music is improving, and 4 people pay me almost $15 a month through Patreon[1]. Probably not a lot to the crowd here at HN, but it's a peace of mind I never knew before.

The big, super-important lesson I got from that is to not cling to what I wanted at some point in the past and accept how things are. I wanted to be fully financially independent, but had no plans, no goals, no notion of how I might make it happen. I had the desire, but not the will or commitment.

Being two seconds and one failure of attention from the front end of an 18-wheeler has a way of hitting the reset button.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/digitalscofflaw