Ask HN: What is next?

Suppose that you have mastered CS as a hobby project. Let's say you have watched all the classic courses, like 6.001 2004, CS61A, Dan Grossman's Prog Langs, Programming methodology course by Gregor Kiczales, Scala courses by Martin Odersky, even the OCaml MOOC etc, etc. Basically, you have bootstrapped yourself to an equivalent of a major in CS (in a foreign language media) just for fun. Originally it was the way to practice English language.

Then you have realized that there is absolutely no market to this kind of knowledge. You are supposed to have top-tier CS degree from an Ivy league college to get a high paying job in the valley (not necessarily having a half of CS knowledge I've accumulated) or to compete on an online sweatshops like UpWork for $10 a task (well, I am exaggerating a bit).

It is rather a cliche that one need a framed diploma on the wall instead of possession of a book knowledge, especially in the age of outsourcing and remote sub-contracting - I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Of course, I know how wonderful it is to write an open source software for the benefit of humanity as a whole, or how to contribute to a top-tier open source project (hi all the guys who are sumbining minor typo corrections and insignificant code reorderings to ghc or golang) but I literally don't know what should I program and why.

This is, of course, related to the overcrowded market. The positions for writing, say, fintech in Haskell in a startup in London or improving Dotty in Geneva are quite limited, related to a population of 7 billion (so you better to have an Ivy leagues credentials indeed) and there is, of course, no demand for top-tier functional languages on Upwork. (I won't even touch PHP or Java, sorry).

So, what next, giving that I am 40+, which means no job prospects no matter what? To give it up and run some fast food joint or what not?