How Can I Work on Interesting Problems and get Paid Well?[mid life crisis]

You are incredibly lucky. You have an in-demand skill that can get you a job at virtually any technology company, around the world. That puts you ahead of pretty much everyone else, who would like to have a meaningful, impactful job but has to accept whatever they can get.

All you need to do is find companies working on things you think are important

Life is a balance between doing what you love and getting paid enough to live.

Your pay is a tool. Use your tool to cause the impact you are looking to make. So if you donate half your income to a charity that supports a cause you care about. Then you are using your skills for something you feel is good.

Alternatively start working for a cause you care about, you will take a significant pay cut.

Can you please define "interesting problem?"

Start by changing your thinking. Are you really "extorting" millions of dollars out of companies that need software? Or are you supplying to them the software that they willingly pay millions for, because the software is actually worth that (at least to them)?

The way you frame that indicates... something. Maybe that you've gotten cynical and bitter about the whole for-profit economy. You might think about why that is, and what it says about what you're looking for. (It's really easy to make a change in a mid-life crisis, and find out that the change only fixed the surface problem, but didn't really get you what you were after.)

This is an existential crisis.

Acheiving midlife crisis requires actually quitting your socially acceptable job to work on interesting problems without the requirement to be well paid.

So long as being well paid is a criterion, you're stuck doing what other people are interested in. Alas, most other people are mostly interested in making money. While making money is useful, making money is among the less interesting things a person can make...as you know.

What does being well paid actually mean?

Is it measured mostly in money and social standing or autonomy?

Good luck.

convince yourself that money for bread and a bed is well enough and you can always find a way to be well paid.

I feel the same as your title implies. Unfortunately, I'm not a partner at a consulting firm and I am not paid very well. I'm just a midlevel dev watching my life go by at an average, boring, job.

Global warming doesn't need your tech skills as much as they require your sales skills. Get yourself elected and make meaningful change while gettig paid.

Otherwise invent something that impacts people and make it open.

I'm in a similar situation. I think if you read a lot of HN and are reasonably successful, your expectations for life can get detrimentally high. And what happiness and meaning you experience largely depends on what you expect. You're already quite successful yet you're probably very unsatisfied. We read so much about startups and these amazing projects other people are doing, but it's hard to understand what you should actually expect from yourself and your life — are these reasonable things to aim for, or even to just dream about? We're only seeing the survivors and successes, not the (how many?) others.

You could try planning for a longer break or vacation to see how you feel with more freedom, do you still want to do something "more meaningful" or do you actually miss work?

Even more than HN, what meaning you find tends to depend on the people around you. Imagine how some people in objectively much worse positions than you can despite that find much more meaning in their lives than you; usually because of the bonds they create with other people. (If you ever watched Star Trek or Futurama, remember how it wasn't the stuff the characters did that made it meaningful, but rather the characters themselves and their relationships..) Your social influences can be hard to change, but that's how it is. Meaning comes from being a part of something. Stuff you do on your own requires so much more effort to reach that same level of meaning.