I wish you the best! At 52 I have cashed out the stock options and paid the mortgage twice. In the end 3 weeks or so is the most I can go without either wanting to help someone build a company or wanting to build a company. There is work life after burnout!
Brings to mind the "Notebooks of Lazarus Long" portions of Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love". Viewed from 52 years old you make me wish my thoughts had been as coherent when I was 30. Good stuff.
Many times. Usually I become disheartened at how difficult the project really is to complete. Then I ask myself if the project is really important to me. If I answer yes I try to break it down to the next 3 steps, and just commit to doing those three. Sometimes you need to learn something to make progress. After a few question - recommit - work cycles more will have been done on the project. Then you wind up refactoring!
Seven layers are a procrustean bed, at best. The model might be useful as a starting point, but really all it means is "good design uses layers." When you start discussing actual networking implementations, trying to fit a what you're doing into "where exactly this fits in the ISO model, and it's wrong if it doesn't fit" is a bad way to think.
Devices that mix layers can do pretty interesting work, too (e.g., inspection of packets for security purposes, smart buffering for controlling host load, etc.). So the "every layer only talks to the layers immediately above and below" is kind of suspect, at least as dogma. There are probably other examples in very high bandwidth systems where you want to skip layers for performance reasons.
Although I'm not really sympathetic to the OSI model, it did get some things right. For instance, witness how almost every TCP/IP protocol has to roll out its own session layer for authentication purposes...
