[JohnBooty]

For a lot of people this change happens when they find a partner.

    Where you shed away all strong emotion in 
    exchange for a consistent tranquility

Once our life decisions affect somebody besides ourselves, it's just so f'ing hard to live freely and fully.

    I would like to add something original instead: 
    the act of selling out, and shifting one's focus 
    towards money is an irreversible change in one's soul.

Part of it is getting older, particularly in a country without universal health care. My wife has a lot of medical conditions and I essentially have to restrict myself to jobs with good pay and benefits. It's absolutely soul-deadening, but the alternative is unclear.

Even without partners and dependents to consider, a lot of basic capitalist "facts" push us toward this stultified complacency. We need places to live. To be a renter is to subject one's self to all kinds of... crap. Owning a home is marginally better in many ways for many people so many of us are incentivized to chase that, but for most people this means chasing a certain amount of money and committing to a mortgage. There are alternatives (van living?) but they're compromised or impractical for many people in various ways.

[ido]

I want to mention that the person you reply to didn't seem to write it as a judgment of one's moral fortitude but just as an observation; I've observed the same in myself while acknowledging that it was indeed a tradeoff for having to live in a system built to push us towards making such tradeoffs (even more so in the US than where I live).

I'm now in the "dreamer" mode (I switch back and forth every few years, depending on circumstance & financial situation) and am enjoying running my own company despite paying myself 60% of what I used to earn (a few years ago, so would have probably be even a bigger difference today) and having a lot more stress as a business owner that has to worry about finances and payroll etc.

But I hope my career is still mostly ahead of me (I'm 39 years old) and fully expect at some point for the pendulum to swing back to "selling out" when the situation changes (and then maybe back again when it changes again!).

I actually know people in our profession (working actively as individual contributors) that still do very "in the trenches" development work in their 60s and enjoy what they're doing (and are very much in demand). I think even when accounting for agism if you're good and keep active/up to date/learning you can work as a developer your entire career.