You are not a failure. You are being dealt a bad hand, and that has happened to entire generations before you.
When external structure disappears, you must replace it with internal structure. Keep a fixed daily routine. Get up at the same time every day and go to bed at the same time every night, regardless of mood or circumstances. Plan for eight hours of sleep. Treat this as non-negotiable.
Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, even if it feels pointless at first. Eat properly. These are not self-help platitudes; they are basic maintenance requirements for keeping your mind functional under prolonged stress.
Be very strict with digital consumption. Doomscrolling and sulking are forms of digital procrastination and they actively worsen the situation. Before switching on the TV, unlocking your smartphone, or engaging with any social media, do 20 push-ups. Every time. If you cannot do push-ups, replace them with squats or another short physical exercise. The goal is to insert friction and break the automatic habit loop.
Do not lie to your friends about your situation. That usually makes things worse over time, not better. People talk, and they already know more than you think anyway.
If you cannot find a job in tech right now, apply to other jobs you can realistically get. Any job. Then become very good at it. Be dependable, knowledgeable, and reliable.
At the same time, actively look for better opportunities. Treat this as an ongoing process, not something that passively happens to you. Apply, network, learn, and reposition yourself continuously. Your loyalty is first to yourself, second to your family, and then to the people you care about, never to an employer. When you find a better opportunity, take it. Change jobs if needed. Repeat.
This is not a judgment on your abilities. It is a rational response to current conditions.
You are attempting to solve the wrong problem, in my opinion.
Do not see clients who do not pay as clients, but as liabilities. The real solution isn't chasing them with smarter reminders, it is changing how you work.
Take partial or full payment upfront, use incremental milestones, and only extend credit to proven partners with a solid track record.
Chasing money after delivery just wastes time and energy. Protect your work, and time, and sanity, not your clients' excuses.
Not really important, Elon Musk bought it and he can do whatever he pleases with X, formerly Twitter.
And secondly, why all the bashing and snickering ? Elon Musk has a proven record of excellence running his companies. I would not be surprised if in a few months time he will smell of roses again. Or maybe he fails, but then he at least tried.
Also get a fricking life, there are more important things like Twitter/X/Elon Musk posts.
Also be honest with yourself if there is a reason in your past performance why your manager is treating you this way.
Ask for a 1-on-1. And don't allow this to be postponed endlessly past 2 weeks. There directly state that you feel being micro managed and that you are not feeling well being managed in this way. It never hurts to be brutally frank in a 1-on-1.
Immediately start interviewing for new positions, it never hurts. Regarding work your only loyality is to yourself, your kids, your partner in life, your family and good friends. Your work is not your family. Your health is part of your capital, so do not allow your capital to be diminished.
You are confusing your work with your life. Never be butthurt, it is only your work.
Collectively ? Hell no, are you a commune ? Don't you have the spine to speak up for yourself ?
Also unless you own a share in the company, it is not yours, so it is not your decision and not your reponsability. Additionally leading a company is not an exercise in popularity.
Therefor your resume should always be up to date and you only owe allegiance to number 1 and your prime interests, i.e. yourself ( and by extension to your kids, your life partner, your parents and longtime friends ).
It never hurts to know your value as an employee, so you might as well take a few interviews, if only to get more experience in negocitating your value as an employee.
Also for this very reason do negociate a sign-up bonus and don't hand in your notice until the bonus is credited to your bank account.
And it says Hacker News in the title, not Twitter/Elon News. In fact if I would not see anything about Elon Musk or Twitter for a week then it would make me supremely happy.
Once you have kids the problems will arise on their own, so you need somebody you can depend on or you will suffer.
Also sleep deprivation is not conductive to having a happy sex life.
In our age marriage is done out of love, but legally it is still a contract about the provisioning of resources and services. Having a happy marriage is like winning the lottery, but having an unhappy marriage is like living in a plane crash waiting to happen every fricking day with you sitting in a window seat. Choose wisely.
My own perspective is that of a husband of a wife with tumors that we thought meant certain death, yet she miraculously survived.
So get three to five personal consultations from different neurosurgeons in our own native language, this is just for your information so that you understand what the different options and opinions are. These consultations are just for your information, these will not likely be the neurosurgeon that will operate. Don't waste time, this can be done in a week to 10 days.
Also don't confuse personal sympathy with professional capacity. You want somebody who has operated a similar operation a few thousand times already. You want a genius in this medical field and not somebody to drink wine with.
What you accomplished here sounds interesting, both from an entrepreneurial point of view and also from the engineering side.
A good, nice, detailed technical write-up of what you achieved here would be very interesting. Maybe a Hackaday.com blog entry, too? Put it on GitHub?
Have fun :)