Change my path

OP here - thanks, I agree. My current contract prohibits side-work in competing areas but there should be ways to get around that. I know a few people already, so the main thing that's missing is the brilliant startup-idea...

And I am 37. This might be an onset of midlife-crisis perhaps

Time for you to be replaced anyways. We've got new biracial gender queer millennials who can do all your enterprise C#/Java in really cool languages like Javascript, Ruby and Python in like a fraction of the lines, and they do it on an iPad! This is the new generation of kids who don't have to program with the limited resources in mind. Isn't it amazing?

I actually spent a year in the AirForce when I was 19. It looked like the place developers went to die. It was chill though

Probably because they still needed programmers who could understand fortran and real programming languages, which is going to attract an older crowd. I imagine those same coders you saw then are still there.

You should get into ransomware development.
That way you would have a passive income, allowing you to spend all the time you want with your family.
You could also consider moving in a country with a weaker currency, finding a remote job, and work as little as you want.

Not OP, but I've always wondered how they cash out cleanly. Let's say you haul $5 million in bitcoin, how do you turn it into real money, whilst evading detection from every government in the world?

It's probably not much different than regular money laundering. i.e. Selling dirty money for clean money or a creating a business front and every so often make a purchase to yourself with dirty money.

Hah yeah im training a couple of young trangenders at the moment, I'm not super worried bout those replacing me just yet. ..and Ruby? Really?

Ruby might be starting to slide out of fashion, as the Rails generation grows older. To be honest, I think this type of nu-coder is just a javascript emitter.