Speaking as someone whose company uses Telnyx... Telnyx has too many incidents/problems to be worth replacing Twilio with. Would go with Bandwidth if you're looking for cheaper-than-Twilio-but-worse-tech.
Yes. Every story and background will vary, but to the question: absolutely, yes.
People seem to be advocating for various forms of therapy, and that can be fine, but I believe you have a genuine mid-life crisis going, and ought to ride that like a wave. You have a lot of potential it seems like, but lack really great guides and collaborators on shared goals.
I am aware of independent coaching that addresses everything you said, and there are plenty of people who can relate and advise in your circumstance. Someone needs to argue with you long enough for you to see that your outlook is not right or wrong, but ineffectual, inferior to your actual standard of living. That is what is peeking through here: a higher standard that will make or break you.
Your outlook is dark but the other side from where you are does make this crisis worth it. You seem at the edge of understanding there is something else, not just something more. From there, all your dilemmas are solvable smoothly in due course. It is similar to the entry of a higher math into a previously inscrutable problem domain. You just need that higher math, to wield it expertly and advance its edge, and for it to click into your way of seeing all situations and your life overall.
Vint Cerf... drinking his own cool aid. Pure propaganda. Centrality can never do what he said. Using a centralized system in a decentralized and free way is bad systems strategy. Why not design for what we actually want rather than try to repurpose a system voted-up artificially by the US Department of Defense?
But we hacked ourselves. I still wonder what the world would be today if we had RINA from the start. Then even one word of that could be true:
"Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the Internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided “lock-in,” and allowed for contributions from many sources. This openness is why the Internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide: the freedom to create and innovate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard."
Most blockchain stuff does seem pretty scammy, yes, so that's my default assumption. At best, if I'm being more charitable than it deserves, it's failed ideology.
(And don't complain about downvotes. Not only is it against site guidelines, it just makes people want to downvote you more for whining about it.)
Love this answer except would recommend Baserow since you want to remove the technical hiccups and get immediate visuals. Combines the Google Sheets and MongoDB aspects.
Airtable is also fine but not self-host capable and getting pretty bloated and clingy with marketing, etc.
People have recommended "scratch your own itch" but I find this is often like trying to see your own eyes.
Imagine a person, or find a person in your life. Create a "persona" around that person's experiences you observe.
So far, if that person is you, great. Now you can see yourself just like you were any other object, with properties and methods, etc.
Then map out the experiences of that persona, and create other personas and do the same for those. As you map out multiple personas, you will start to see shared experiences they have.
As you look through shared experiences you will start to find pain points, and soon you will have pain points that are the same across many personas.
Pain point mapping can be as high-level as "does not have viable future" or as low-level as "cannot remember password" so you want something in the middle like "cannot understand how to get traffic" or a mid-low "forgets to buy milk" or "cannot ..."
This is what people usually partner with a Growth Hacker for, or have a cofounder with ideas already and needs a technical solution to an idea already prepared.
First impression: this is the reverse order, because you started selling the moment you chose to invest in this business idea.
You already know the value, otherwise you would not have made it. But more so, you ought to have audience already engaged before you write the first line of code, if it is a code-oriented value proposition for your brand.
Getting market share, building traction, cultivating momentum, these are all totally separate of having the product actually online. The key is the value proposition. And if you cannot get attention for that, without the product even there perhaps, you have no "yellow brick road" to travel, and sales do not make themselves. But if you get attention for something, all you have to do then is follow through on the promise of your brand, and deliver the value.
Cold sales work great when your value proposition is natural, and market is not cluttered. But I would refer you to "The Lean Brand" for the real mindset you need, no matter how you sell:
Seeing the Lake Powell level decline ( and knowing that also means electricity, not just water shortfalls in the future for the Western Coast ) it does seem all this conservation and logistics thinking might have had a chance to be meaningfully effective if it started around 2010 at the latest, and been completed now, or within 5 years. Best get ahead of this rather than chase the target.
Anyone who traveled through "The Dust Bowl" or the Salton Sea as mentioned, or looked at the end of the Colorado River, which now does not make it to the Gulf of Mexico, knows that California in particular is on a knife's edge when it comes to water, and electricity.
Needs to be a paradigm shift here, and one that is sustainable from the start, rather than micro improvements and figuring out things that are decades past being common sense.
