Retired - sort of - when the remains of my last two start-ups died (in the same month!) after the pandemic and were sold for OK money. Now doing a part-time PhD working fixing the climate.
Coping - generally fine - helped by building up a new network of friends and doing things like going clubbing and going to music festivals and giving talks and running voluntary orgs. Just been out for beers with my mentee; he will be giving a talk at a session that I am running tomorrow with the local council.
You can work on climate fixes quietly within a current role (eg write more efficient code, scheduling non-critical stuff away from demand peaks towards generation peaks, ... #frugalComputing) or maybe move to a role which has some explicit climate goals.
There are so many things to work on, some can be tackled as a start-up, which is HN territory! My last start-up developed a domestic heating control to save energy by setting back temperatures a little when a room is empty and likely to stay empty for a while. There's >500k units installed.
My PhD is finding how to best improve decarbonisaton of UK home heating (~14% of UK GHGs). Mainly by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. Did my own at the end of last year.
Coping - generally fine - helped by building up a new network of friends and doing things like going clubbing and going to music festivals and giving talks and running voluntary orgs. Just been out for beers with my mentee; he will be giving a talk at a session that I am running tomorrow with the local council.