How I Found My Ikigai After Burning Out at 28

The Night I Couldn’t Get Out of My Car

I want to tell you about a Tuesday in November, 2022. I’d just pulled into the parking garage at work — a gleaming campus in Mountain View that most engineers would kill to badge into. I turned the engine off. And then I just… sat there.

For forty-five minutes.

I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t having a panic attack. I was just profoundly unable to care enough to open the door. My calendar had seven meetings. I had a performance review coming up. My team was shipping a feature I’d architected. None of it mattered. Not even a little.

I was 28, making more money than my parents ever had combined, and I was the emptiest I’d ever been in my life.

The Resume That Looked Great on Paper

Let me back up. On paper, I was killing it. Computer science degree from a good school. Hired at a Big Tech company right out of college. Promoted twice in four years. Stock options. The apartment in San Francisco. The whole costume.

And look, I’m not going to pretend the money didn’t matter. It did. Growing up, my family wasn’t poor, but we were the kind of family that noticed when gas prices went up twenty cents. So when that first direct deposit hit — more in two weeks than my dad made in a month — I felt like I’d beaten the game.

But here’s what nobody tells you about beating the game: you still have to wake up every morning and play it.

The work itself was fine. I was good at it. That was almost the worst part. I wasn’t struggling, I wasn’t failing, I wasn’t being challenged in any meaningful way. I was just… optimizing ad delivery systems. Making a number go up so that another number would go up so that a line on a quarterly earnings slide would go up. I was a well-compensated cog in a machine I didn’t care about.

This is what you worked so hard for? That thought started showing up around year three. By year four, it was screaming.

The Parking Garage Aftermath

After the car incident, things deteriorated fast. I started calling in sick. Then I stopped calling and just didn’t show up. I’d stay up until 4 AM doom-scrolling, sleep until noon, skip meals, repeat. My girlfriend at the time told me I seemed like a ghost wearing my own skin. She wasn’t wrong.

I finally went to my doctor, who told me what I already knew: burnout, depression, the whole package deal. She suggested therapy, which I started. She also suggested I take a leave of absence, which I did. Three months.

The first month, I mostly slept and watched a truly embarrassing amount of reality television. The second month, I got bored enough to start reading again. And that’s when my therapist — bless that woman — handed me a book about ikigai.

A Word I Couldn’t Pronounce Changed Everything

I’ll be honest: I almost didn’t read it. The cover looked like something you’d find in the “self-help” section of an airport bookstore, wedged between a Tony Robbins hardcover and a book about manifesting wealth through crystals. I’m a software engineer. I trust systems, not philosophies.

But I was also a software engineer sitting on his couch in sweatpants at 2 PM on a Wednesday with nowhere to be and nothing to live for, so maybe my usual approach wasn’t working.

The concept was deceptively simple. Four circles: what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at. Your ikigai lives at the intersection.

I grabbed a notebook — an actual paper notebook, like some kind of caveman — and started writing.

Getting Honest With the Four Circles

What I’m good at was easy. I’m a strong engineer. I can build things. I can break down complex systems into understandable parts. I can debug code at 2 AM on three hours of sleep. Standard nerd stuff.

What I can be paid for was also easy. Software. Obviously. The market had made that abundantly clear.

The other two circles were where things got uncomfortable.

What I love. I stared at this one for a long time. I kept trying to write “coding” because that felt like the correct answer, the one that would keep my career trajectory intact. But I forced myself to be honest. What I actually loved was explaining things. I loved being the person on the team who could take a gnarly technical concept and make it click for someone. I loved mentoring junior engineers. I’d volunteered as a CS tutor in college and it was the happiest I’d been in a classroom — and I was the one teaching, not learning.

I also loved making things. Not optimizing things. Not maintaining things. Making things. From scratch. The feeling of something existing that didn’t exist before because I willed it into being.

What the world needs. This one cracked me open a little. I thought about all the people like me — smart kids from regular families who got funneled into tech because it was the “safe” path. Kids who were good at math and science and got told that meant they should be engineers, full stop. Nobody ever asked them what they wanted. Nobody taught them how to even think about that question.

The world needed better ways to help people figure out what to do with their lives. Not career aptitude tests from 1997. Not a guidance counselor who meets you twice. Something real.

The Intersection I Didn’t Expect

When I looked at my four circles, the overlap was staring at me: education technology focused on self-discovery. Building tools that help people figure out who they are and what they should be doing. Using tech, design, and genuine human understanding to make that process less terrible than it was for me.

I laughed out loud when I saw it. It was so obvious. And it was absolutely nothing like what I’d been doing for the previous five years.

The Terrifying Part

I quit my job four months later. I want to be clear about something: this was terrifying. I had savings, but not “retire at 30” savings. I had a plan, but not a business plan. I had conviction, but conviction doesn’t pay rent in San Francisco.

I moved to a cheaper city. I took freelance contracts to keep the lights on. I spent every spare hour building the first version of what would become my company — a platform that uses thoughtful conversation design and real psychology (not just personality quizzes with horoscope-level accuracy) to help people explore their own version of ikigai.

The first year was brutal. I made less money than I had as an intern. My parents were confused. Some of my friends thought I was having a prolonged crisis. Maybe I was. But for the first time in years, I was awake. I was building something I believed in, using skills I’d spent a decade developing, to solve a problem I understood in my bones.

Where I Am Now

It’s been a little over three years. The startup is small but real. We have users. We have revenue. We have a team of five people who all found their way here through their own winding paths. I make less than half what I made at Big Tech. I have never been happier.

I don’t say that to be preachy. Happiness is a weird, unreliable metric. What I really mean is: I have a reason to get out of the car.

That’s ikigai. Not some mystical state of eternal bliss. Just a reason to get up, a reason that connects what you’re good at, what you care about, what the world is asking for, and what keeps you fed. It sounds simple because it is. The hard part is being honest enough with yourself to actually find it.

What I’d Tell 28-Year-Old Me

Stop optimizing for the wrong variables. The salary, the title, the company name on your LinkedIn — those are metrics for someone else’s game. Figure out your game first.

And for the love of everything, don’t wait until you’re sitting in a parking garage unable to move before you start asking the real questions. Start now. Grab a notebook. Draw four circles.

You might be surprised what’s been waiting for you at the center.