Has anyone here actually gone back to a normal job

Depends what you'd be going back to, which nobody in this thread is specifying.

Going back to a job that's adjacent to what you already do is easy and most people who say they went back mean that. Going back to something genuinely unrelated - the warehouse rota job in the opening post - is a completely different experiment and I've only ever seen two people do it. One's still there after five years and looks ten years younger. The other lasted a season.

I'd guess the split is about whether you were running from the work or from yourself, and you don't find out which until about month four.

Went back to ops for two years. The on-call rota was less stressful than a payment processor going quiet. FWIW.

that's not a joke either and everyone who's had a balance frozen knows it

No, and I've never wanted to, but I keep a number.

It's the number where if the year came in under it I'd stop. I've had it since 2019, I revise it every January, and it has never once been close. I don't know whether having it makes me more or less likely to actually do it and I've stopped trying to work that out.

Curious whether anyone else has one or whether that's a strange thing to have.

I have one. I've never said it out loud and I'm not going to now.

I have number also. Anyway it go down every year, this is bad sign i think.

nobody in a normal job gets to look at their own balance at 3am and that's the whole appeal and the whole problem

Is true. Is not freedom, is only that nobody stop you.

This thread has better answers than most of the technical ones, so I'll put my own in without a structure for once.

I went back for three years, 2015 to 2018, in-house at a company that will mean nothing to anyone here. I did not go back because I was failing. I went back because I had got good enough at this that it had stopped being interesting, and a job was the only environment I could think of where someone would hand me problems I hadn't chosen.

That worked, for about two years. What ended it was a reorg that put me under someone who measured the thing I was doing by a metric that could not measure it, and I discovered that I could tolerate being bored but not being mismeasured. I suspect that's a personality trait rather than a principle.

The part worth passing on: I came back better. Three years of having to explain my reasoning to people who could veto it made me much harder to fool, and almost everything I've written on this board that anyone has bookmarked comes from that habit rather than from anything I learned before or since.

So the answer to the thread is yes, it's survivable, and it is not the failure everyone here quietly assumes it is. The people who never consider it are not obviously doing better than the people who did.

Didn't expect this thread to go here. Glad it did.

Half the people saying they'd never go back have never been offered anything worth going back to.

ouch

Leaving this one open. It's off-topic and it's the best thread on the board this month.

Three weeks later and I'm reading job listings again. Good year, apparently.

Bumping because I ran into the warehouse rota guy again.

Still there. Still says it's the best decision he ever made. He also asked me, without any edge to it, how much I made last year, and when I told him he said that sounds exhausting and changed the subject.

I've thought about that more than anything else in this thread.