Finding Direction in Life

Many of us go through life in a way that, when we look at it, just "ends up" happening. There's nothing really wrong with this. To be sure, more than a few people have ended up in very good places simply doing what they wanted to. Others have not. Well, probably most have not, generally speaking. There's simply no telling, I suppose. Or so it would seem.
Personally, my life ended up with me as an English teacher and small business owner, in that order, in Japan. English teaching was not something I ever considered doing until shortly before I found myself doing it. It was a good job at the time as I was of the ripe old age of 26. It offered a lot of free time and income compared to what others my age had to look forward to in this country. Responsibilities was comparatively low and, as I would learn rather painfully, expectations even lower. The problem was there was very little chance of upward mobility. Teachers who had been at the job for 10 or even 20 years rarely were doing anything that different from teachers who'd only been working a few months. and I worked nights and weekends a lot. Terrible hours for a family man.
So I changed jobs and worked at a private elementary school for a few years teaching English (of course) along with math, science, music and PE. It was a horrible place and, looking back, it's hard to forgive myself for staying there that long. While things may be slowly changing, it is generally true that Japanese companies are notoriously hierarchical, old-fashioned, backwards and controlling. Your status is determined far more by your relationship with the boss and his/her cronies than anything else and abuse is a commonality. The place has, for all intents and purposes, basically failed to leave its feudal past behind when it comes to the work place.　Anyway, after finally pulling the ejection handles on that disaster, and merely as a temporary staging ground, I found myself at a large corporate school in the city whiling away my days staring at the clock. But I was still essentially doing the same work I'd been doing (at that point) for 5 years. Sure I was good at it. The students young and old liked me. And it was stable work. But I felt deeply dissatisfied with my life. Something was nagging me about it. Why was I doing this kind of work? What could I do to make it better? Was this really my future? Was I doomed to milk the clock? To fill out and stamp a form if I wanted to go outside? To skirt the maze of office gossip, personality clashes and general bizarre anomalies that come with humans being canned in an office together for years on end?

The answer, I would decide, would be to start my own school. That, I thought, would be the ticket! It was challenging enough and promising enough to really engage me. I could actually feel like I was doing something that wasn't being handed to me. Like I was using my skills to build and learn instead of riding off my nationality as a means to get through the day. I could wake up and not feel like a hack.
And so that is what I did. I opened my own school and succeeded in doing it. Now, here is sit in my office after my last class for the evening has finished and I have that same feeling again. A deep, nagging dissatisfaction with my life. A feeling that I can't forgive myself if I don't take action to change the trajectory of where things are going. And that is why I have decided to change careers.

Looking back, the decision has been at the back of my mind for several years now. For the longest time, over a decade actually, English teaching seemed like my one and only option for employment given my "geographic impairment" as I refer to my living in Japan. You see, in my area which is where my wife and all of her family grew up and where my three children were born, I can count the number of foreigners I have seen working in jobs other than English teaching or bar tending on one hand. And I am not exaggerating when I say that. But still, why didn't I think outside the box? Why didn't I see what there was to see in regard to doing something different? That, I believe, is something all of us could learn a lot from by asking ourselves. It's just that, in a situation like mine where the environment is so utterly different and non-conducive to professional growth and stimulation, the chances of the question even arising are reduced by so much more than they would be back home.

But the spark was there. Almost immediately after attaining profitability with my English school I turned to pursuing various side hustles, most of them online. Amazon FBA. Affiliate marketing. Cryptocurrency trading and promotion. And then I started to feel kind of scammy. Like I was riding on the momentum of what others had done and not really contributing. I began to realize that, unconsciously, I was attempting to make up for the time I'd lost on these strange islands away from the opportunities, people and growth I'd left behind in the United States. Slowly, very slowly these longings and realizations led me to the world of software development. I can't say why exactly other than that perhaps it was the sheer amount of time I spent on the internet researching products and platforms that led me to find an underlying commonality to it all: the whole thing ran on software and that software was being designed and updated by human beings. And these human beings were bringing real, true value to people all over the world.
It was like a little light went on inside my head. But wait, wasn't "coding and all that stuff" like... hard?