I used to get paged at 1am to mess with downed webservers, now I hang out in a shack with no running water in rural CO.

I'm 48 and have a chunk of cash that made more last year than I've ever been able to make in a single year doing salaried labor as a programmer.

I quit 3 years ago when my kiddo graduated college and have been just living on that and my small A/V production business.

It's great.

I do a lot of work; I have done first aid at one music festival, paid sound at a bluegrass festival, and sat around doing random volunteer stuff at another. I can give the local music school and the local civic orchestra really good bids on doing sound for them. I am going to get an EMT cert because I have a friend who contracts to do first-aid at festivals.

I'm not at all worried that my (pre-LLM) programming skills and connections are going away- I've replaced them with mandolin skills and much happier.