Ask HN: Has anyone been where I am? Bunt out?

Charge more. You are probably underselling yourself. Even if higher cost equals less work, you'll have less stress for the same amount of cash.

Read up on Rob Walling (http://www.softwarebyrob.com/). He hit the same wall while freelancing. He started building products and web properties as a way to get off the hamster wheel and work for himself instead of other people.

I agree with what a couple other people have mentioned. You're not alone. Almost everyone feels that way at one point in time - it's a fact of life. You don't instantly become CEO...you have to work your way up.

Also, you should increase your prices a bit. There is a reason you are getting web jobs and you need other people working for you. You are out of balance. If you can't hire anyone then ideally you would like just the right amount of work for you (meaning you lose some customers by raising the cost).

Finally, don't worry about which languages you know. If you know 5 languages, but you're not fantastic at them then you're just average anyway. Specialize in HTML, who cares? If you're the best you'll make money so keep learning.

By the way, don't buy into this whole American dream where you should go deep into debt to mortgage a new house and car. Much of the world spends much longer at home and 24 is by no means old, especially if you're saving money. Keep driving that clunker and enjoying the time with your family while you save your money.

Send me an email (in profile) if you want to talk some more.

Keep raising your prices until you're at a point where you're not getting more work than you can handle. That point is precisely how much your time is worth in dollars.

It's not a question of how you rate vs other people. It's a question of how much your customers pay you. If they're paying you and walking away satisfied, you are a professional, not a fraud.

Its just like how the Facebook stream makes so many people feel sad; other people only share what they want, essentially marketing themselves. There are hundreds of successful and happy developers for every person on HN who rambles on and on about reading SICP every weekend or writing their own compiler.

First of all, congrats on getting this far. As you know, your consulting biz is a straight services play and will only grow in relation to how many employees you have. Increasing price to match demand will only get you so far (unless you're a superstar). You do have a lot of options to grow depending on what kind of work you want to do.

- Build a network and do a rev share with other freelancers with different specialities. This will allow you to offload tasks you are mediocre at and focus on what you do well. This should increase network productivity and deal flow IF you find the right people.

- Expand on the cheap. Outsource specific tasks offshore. Do not outsource entire projects. To outsource for cost, you must break down everything into small manageable pieces.

- Move into account management and client services. Find firms/other freelancers who compete on cost and distribute your work over them. Quality and profit per project will drop but you should be able to increase your project flow significantly.

IMHO the best way is to build products and move out of services.

(I've done this a few times and currently have a small network of other freelancers while I work at a bootstrapped company.)

I'm in my early twenties, at one point in my life there was a time when all I cared about were drugs, how many I could do, how many I had done, and how great of a time I could have on them.

Mixed with a bout of bad depression because my dad got sick it got to the point where I lost sight of what was important in life.

In all honesty, I expected by now I'd be dead. Sometimes, I still do. It wasn't till I had dropped out of college and started working a dead end job that I decided it was time to change. The fear of being stuck there the rest of my life and having lost all my potential from previous years was the scariest thing I've ever felt in my life, but it was also probably the best thing that could have happened to me..

I woke up at 4am, developed till I went in at 3pm, and then went straight to bed when I got home at midnight. I did this for months and months having never done any formal web programming before. I started with the basics, html and css. From there I went on to php, ruby, js, and obj-c. Each one was challenging.

All that stemmed from wanting to do "web design". Web programming gave me plenty of challenges that were easy enough to solve with brute force and hard work.

Don't give up. Keep challenging yourself. You're at your wits end and you say you're exhausted, and that's understandable. Getting my life back on track actually didn't start with programming for me, it started with exercise. I recommend taking up something you've always enjoyed and that you can do once a day. It will relieve stress and give you down time to relieve yourself from the worries of the world, your life, and your objectives.

Work not just on your web talent, but your life talent. Your sleep talent, your eating talent, your brain talent. Do puzzles. Challenge yourself. Don't give up.

For me www.reddit.com/r/get_motivated has helped in a big way. I know that may sound corny but fuck, sometimes those little quotes can do a lot for me. When I wake up sad or when it feels like things aren't going like they should, it's the little things that you need to do to get through to the next day.

You can get out of this rut by not giving up. By going on, working hard, and not quitting. It may not happen in a day, a week, a month, a year, or even two years. But as long as you keep going, one day it will happen.

If you need encouragement advice or help in any way, reply to my comment with a way for me to contact you. You are not alone, brother.