After Turning 40, I Decided to Stop Actively Job Hunting

On November 13, 2026, I decided to make an adjustment to my career:

Starting today, I will no longer actively look for full-time jobs. Instead, I will devote my main time and energy to my own blog, open-source projects, and multilingual websites.

This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision, nor is it because I have achieved financial freedom.

Quite the opposite: I am still under considerable financial pressure, and my own projects still have a long way to go before they can provide a stable income.

But I have become increasingly aware of something: even if I found another job, it would not necessarily improve my financial situation in any fundamental way. More importantly, a few years from now I would likely have to face the same problem all over again.

Two emails I received recently made me think about this more seriously.

1. Two Emails, Two Different Directions

1. A recruitment email

On November 11, 2026, I received an email from learnblockchain.

They said they had found me through learnblockchain, that they were currently hiring a Senior Backend Engineer, and that they hoped to discuss the opportunity further.

It was a very simple recruitment email, with no detailed description of the job requirements, salary, or specific responsibilities.

In the past, I might have followed up to find out whether the position was a good fit.

This time, however, I found that I had little interest.

Not because I thought the job was bad, or that the opportunity was not worth considering, but because I am no longer very willing to return to my previous mode of career development.

I ultimately decided to politely decline.

I want my future work to revolve around my own projects, rather than primarily around the business needs of a particular company.

2. A different email: a blog partnership inquiry

That same week, on November 13, 2026, I received a very different kind of email.

This time it was IPCOM.CC reaching out to me.

They described it as a website offering IP lookup and detection services, including IP geolocation, ISP, ASN, network range, and detection results for VPNs, proxies, Tor, and more.

They said they would like IPCOM.CC to be listed on my blog, and asked about advertising options and pricing.

Unlike the recruitment invitation, this email sparked my interest in learning more.

That is because it relates to the blog I have been running for a long time.

My blog has always covered software development, Linux, server operations, networking environments, and AI tools. IP lookup and network detection tools genuinely overlap with the topics of some of my articles.

Of course, I did not agree to a partnership right away, nor did I quote a price immediately.

In my reply, I first asked a few questions:

1. What kind of promotion did they have in mind—adding links to existing articles, a standalone product introduction, or purchasing ad space?
2. Did they have specific target articles, ad placements, and a partnership duration in mind?
3. Did they already have a preliminary budget?
4. Would paid promotional links be acceptable if marked with the rel="sponsored" identifier?

I also made it clear that any partnership involving product introductions would have to be based on actual experience and objective evaluation.

As of writing this article, this is still only a preliminary business inquiry. It does not mean a deal has been reached, much less that I have earned any income from it.

But it made me realize something once again:

The same technical skills accumulated over the years can be used in two ways: one is to seek job opportunities through employment applications; the other is to attract business partnerships through my own content and projects.

I increasingly prefer the latter.

2. In fact, my blog had received promotional inquiries before

IPCOM.CC is not the first commercial service provider to contact me.

Previously, I had received a number of promotional partnership inquiries involving VPNs, cryptocurrency trading platforms, and AI subscription services.

For example, AI subscription providers once contacted me hoping to do backlink or sponsored-post collaborations, and some even offered a one-month ChatGPT Plus subscription as a trial resource.

I have also written about these experiences:

A previous record about ChatGPT Plus subscription services

However, I did not accept a product recommendation partnership just because someone was willing to provide a free subscription.

The reason is simple: if I have not actually used a product, it is difficult for me to give a responsible assessment of it.

This applies especially to platforms involving accounts, subscriptions, network services, or financial transactions—they should not be recommended to readers simply because a promotion fee is offered.

I would rather stick to a few principles:

• Articles should be based on genuine usage experience, actual testing, or well-grounded research.
• Commercial partnerships should not take away my right to give negative reviews.
• Interests such as free trials, sponsorships, and commissions should be properly disclosed.
• Paid promotional links must follow the applicable labeling standards.

These principles may cost me some short-term partnership opportunities.

But in the long run, I believe the truly valuable part of a blog is precisely that readers can trust its content.

If, for short-term income, the blog were turned into a place that simply sells backlinks and sponsored posts, the content value accumulated over the years could be damaged as well.

3. How much commercial value does the blog actually have now?

To judge this question more objectively, I recently took a close look at my Baidu Tongji and Google Analytics data.

The statistics cover October 14 to November 12, 2026.

According to Baidu Tongji:

Metric	Last 30 days
Site-wide pageviews	144,084 PV
Chinese blog pageviews	8,768 PV
Chinese blog visitors	7,322 UV
Average time on the Chinese blog	2 min 07 sec

The Chinese blog gets an average of about 292 pageviews per day.

Of these, a previous article about ChatGPT Plus received 415 PV over these 30 days, and another article about my Zoog experience received 125 PV.

These numbers are nothing remarkable.

But for a technical blog maintained long-term and updated continuously by an individual, they do show that some of the content is being visited.

More notably, some service providers have started reaching out to me through the blog to inquire about promotional partnerships.

This at least means that, beyond recording technical experience, the blog has begun to attract a certain amount of commercial interest.

Why did I not use the higher traffic figures from Google Analytics?

Over the same period, Google Analytics 4 reported 177,682 pageviews for the Chinese blog.

Looking at that number alone, it would be easy to overestimate the site’s actual traffic.

But upon closer inspection, I found clear anomalies in the session sources.

Of 179,057 sessions, 171,149 were attributed to Direct traffic—about 95.58% of the total.

The average engagement time for this traffic was only about 1 second, and the engagement rate was also low.

These signs make me suspect possible automated visits, source attribution anomalies, or issues with the statistics implementation.

At this point I do not have enough evidence to confirm the exact cause, so I cannot simply assert that all of it is bot traffic.

But for now, I am not willing to use these clearly inflated figures to demonstrate how much commercial value my blog has.

By comparison, I prefer for the time being to use Baidu Tongji’s 8,768 PV as a conservative reference for assessing the Chinese blog’s traffic.

Even so, pageviews cannot be directly equated with commercial income.

Whether long-term partnerships can be secured, and how much advertising is worth, ultimately depends on traffic quality, content relevance, and actual conversion results.

Commercial inquiries are a positive signal, but there is still a long way to go before the blog can generate a stable income.

4. Why am I no longer willing to keep job hunting?

There is a saying I once heard:

“Job hunting at 40 is asking for humiliation.”

I do not agree with its literal meaning.

No matter your age, earning an income through your own labor and technical skills is nothing to be ashamed of.

Continuing to work in software development past 40 can be a perfectly respectable career choice.

What actually changed for me was not age itself, but that I began to recalculate time and opportunity costs.

1. Finding a job does not mean solving all problems

I am indeed under financial pressure right now.

If I could find a well-paying job, it would certainly ease some of the problems.

But given my actual situation, I no longer believe that finding another job can fundamentally solve all my financial difficulties.

Employment income depends on how much time I can put in and how much the employer is willing to pay.

Even if my income were to increase, that would not mean the financial pressure would disappear entirely.

More importantly, I need to think seriously about the next few years.

Suppose I joined a company again, and then, three or five years later, had to look for work once more for one reason or another.

At that point, I would likely face the same issues of age, the job market, and competition for positions.

And what long-term assets that truly belong to me would I have accumulated by then?

Of course, a job can also build technical experience, industry knowledge, and professional connections.

But what I want now is to apply that accumulation directly to projects I run for the long term.

2. Time matters more than it used to

I had also considered taking on outsourcing projects.

Some of them could bring in what looks like decent income, but might require more than a month, or even longer, of full commitment.

To my past self, such opportunities might have been very attractive.

Now, I think more carefully:

If I spent the next several months entirely on outsourcing, how much would my multilingual projects suffer?

Launches might be delayed, technical work might be interrupted, and the website content and search engine accumulation could also be affected.

These losses may not be immediately convertible into money, yet they can directly affect the projects’ future development.

Of course, independent projects may also fail to deliver the expected returns.

But if I am never willing to invest continuous, uninterrupted time, they may never reach the stage of validating a business model.

3. I do not want to start over from scratch in a few years

For me, the most important question is actually this:

Five years from now, do I want to still be searching for my next job, or to have spent five years continuously building a career of my own?

Both paths carry risks, and both could pay off.

It is just that I now prefer the latter.

Not because it is necessarily more likely to succeed, but because it better matches the direction I want to commit to for the long term.

5. What am I planning to invest my future in?

This is not a case of deciding to give up on jobs and only then starting to look for an entrepreneurial direction.

In fact, I have already invested a great deal of time in my own projects.

1. Continue running the technical blog

永夜 (Yongye) is where I have long accumulated technical experience and records of solving real problems.

It covers software development, Linux, servers, WordPress, AI tools, and all kinds of hands-on usage and troubleshooting records.

In the past, I mostly saw the blog as a platform for technical notes and knowledge sharing.

Now I am also thinking seriously about whether it can gradually grow into a sustainably run content platform.

Beyond Google AdSense advertising revenue, I could carefully explore content-related business partnerships in the future.

But one thing will not change: I do not want to sacrifice the authenticity of the content itself for advertising income.

2. Continue building the Go multilingual project

Another important direction is the Go multilingual learning and documentation project I have been steadily advancing.

I hope that, through multilingual translation, developers in different languages can learn Go more easily.

This project is not simply a matter of translating English documentation into Chinese.

To support multiple languages, I have invested substantial effort in translation workflows, quality review, terminology consistency, automated checks, and website construction.

At present, work such as the Chinese Site v2 is still ongoing.

They are still far from mature operation, and there are plenty of technical and operational challenges.

But I hope this infrastructure can keep improving over time, rather than having to rebuild it from scratch every time a new project starts.

3. Prepare for a second multilingual project

Beyond Go, I have also begun exploring multilingual content development in other fields.

After a period of research, the direction of the second project has been settled: world history.

The research phase has been completed, but formal implementation has not yet begun.

I hope to gradually apply the multilingual technology and workflow experience I have accumulated to other areas of knowledge.

If these projects can be built continuously, there may eventually be multiple content platforms that are independent of one another yet share some of the underlying capabilities.

Of course, these are still only long-term development plans, not achievements that have already been realized.

6. I know the path I have chosen is not an easy one

Working independently does not automatically generate income just because I stopped going to an office.

Servers cost money, domains need renewing, websites need maintenance, and content needs continuous updates.

As AI tools gradually become an essential part of development and translation work, the associated subscription and usage costs also need to be considered.

Not to mention that website traffic, search engine indexing, and advertising income all involve considerable uncertainty.

The biggest practical problem I face right now is still how to gradually give my projects sufficient earning power.

So I do not intend to portray this decision as having already found a path to success.

It is more like a deliberate choice.

From now on, I need to pay closer attention to the actual operating results of my projects:

• Is the website attracting sustained, credible traffic?
• Can advertising and business partnerships gradually turn into actual income?
• Can the multilingual projects be converted into long-term growth?
• Is the time I keep investing producing measurable results?

I do not want to ignore the real problems these projects face just because I enjoy working on them.

Likewise, I do not want to keep oscillating between job hunting, outsourcing, and project building just because there is no obvious income in the short term.

I need to give the direction I have chosen enough time, while regularly testing it against real data.

7. A decision written to my future self

On November 13, 2026, I decided to formally adjust my career direction.

Starting today:

First, I will no longer actively send out resumes or look for full-time positions.

I will no longer treat finding my next job as the primary goal of my future development.

Second, I will make the blog and the multilingual projects my main career.

I will devote more continuous time to project building, content improvement, website operations, and exploring business models.

Third, I will no longer easily sacrifice the development of long-term projects for short-term income.

This does not mean rejecting all business opportunities, however.

Reasonable advertising partnerships, content collaborations, and other business opportunities compatible with my projects’ development are still worth evaluating.

Fourth, I will not shy away from the real financial pressure.

I must pay attention to actual income, necessary expenses, and how the projects are developing, rather than relying on enthusiasm alone to keep going.

If objective conditions change significantly in the future, I will also re-evaluate my specific approach. Adjusting the strategy does not mean repudiating today’s choice.

Finally

As I write this article, I have not achieved financial freedom through my own projects.

The blog has some traffic and has started to receive a few business inquiries, but it is still far from having an established, mature business model.

The Go multilingual project is still under construction, and the world history project has not yet entered the formal implementation stage.

Whether this will succeed, I do not know.

But I do know that if I continue to put my main time into the next job, my own projects may forever have to be advanced in my spare time.

And I am no longer willing to go on that way.

In the past, I used my technical skills to solve problems for various projects.

In the future, I want to use those same skills to build something for myself that can accumulate over the long term.

After turning 40, I will no longer actively look for jobs.

Not because there is anything shameful about job hunting, but because I want to make a serious attempt at working for my own career.

November 13, 2026—recording this decision.

I hope that when I read this article again a few years from now, I will be able to see clearly what this day’s choice has brought.