But look at the closest competitors and see what they charge perhaps?
For example, take a look at Cockroach Labs, or MySQL InnoDB Cluster, or one of the many database as a service providers, or whatever you think is the closest competitor, and see what their licensing terms and pricing are...
Your income is mostly a function of the value you create and deliver. It could be you were not creating or delivering enough value. You say you can create static sites? That's a good start if you know HTML+CSS. Why not as a next step learn JavaScript on the side and take it from there?
Surprisingly common to feel like this. You've done 4 years. Hope you've been saving hard. You should be able to take a year out and rest up and see what takes your fancy - you might find after a good break your interest in software is rekindled.
p.s. I believe all software engineers should be factoring in a year out for every five years worked.
Tip, when you get the urge to buy, simply add to your wishlist. Periodically (say every 3 months) go through your list. You'd be surprised at how many titles you can delete! :)
It's always handy to have a few unread books available though...
Depends. Using the "4% rule" you should be able to drawn down $40k/year, without depleting your capital, so if you can live on that then in theory the answer is yes. There are various provisos with using the 4% rule but I won't go into them here. A couple of other options:
1) You could retire from full-time work and do the odd contract.
2) Set up a little sideline. It wouldn't have to make much as you already have a lot saved.
3) Part-time job at Starbucks (or similar). This is also known as Barista FIRE (FIRE is Financial Independence Retire Early). The idea is in USA you'd get the Starbucks free health care, and a little income, plus it might be fun, if somewhat hectic.
4) You really do need to think about what you would want your retired life to look like. "Not work" will only be enough to take you through the "decompression zone", not beyond.
One final point. Things change. You change. Life happens. At some point you might want to get married, have ten kids, and build a house in the countryside. Who knows. I think that's why keeping your skills honed and brain working in "retirement" is probably a good idea.
I suspect that stress is "baked into the corporate cake" - in other words, most corporations are quite toxic to mental and physical health by their very nature. A lot of the stress is caused by things like changing requirements, unrealistic deadlines and poor management - you know, the usual stuff. Something like sys admin in a University might be less stressful, but it's been a long time since I worked in academia and I left because things were changing drastically (and not for the better). If you want really low stress you might be better off outside of the software industry altogether...
Deadline driven development is leading cause of 90% of my professional stress. I would understand if deadline was due to some external factors like customer demands or security vulnerability. But I hate when I ask why such a tight deadline and the answer is well higher ups fault.
But look at the closest competitors and see what they charge perhaps?
For example, take a look at Cockroach Labs, or MySQL InnoDB Cluster, or one of the many database as a service providers, or whatever you think is the closest competitor, and see what their licensing terms and pricing are...