Hey mate. Don’t know if this is a bad post or not, but I can share my 2 cents: I was separated from my parents and worked to put myself through school and college in a very poor country (not my own). I wanted to do one of two things: game development and/or hacking.
Unfortunately, I could do neither since I needed to pay rent.
I ended up using the little programming knowledge I had to get through college (a very cheap and shitty one) and get a job as an frontend developer. I didn’t like it, but I accepted it. You’ll learn to like it if you accept it.
Fast-forward almost 10 years later, I became quite good at it. I moved to a better country, continued working as a mobile developer, but in the last year, I was able to transition to a job in the security industry as a senior developer.
I’m still doing development, but for security systems, which is pretty cool. I also do some malware analysis here and there.
tl;dr: security and game development are “Passion Industries”: people would do them for free if they could, which is why it is over-saturated with dreamers and heavily-exploited and it won’t pay your rent. Bug bounties are cool, but it’s better to get a job that pays a steady income and allows you to think about other things: friends, family, personal development outside of a computer, etc.
Study and get a job as a database engineer, an embedded systems developer, a data scientist, a hardware engineer, or a mobile/frontend/backend developer. All of them pay good money and, when you get out of a bad situation, you can always take that knowledge and apply it verbatim to career as a pentester/analyst/etc. I doubt you’d lose anytime or experience if you work as a developer.
It’s not giving-up. I’d say it’s more rising-up, but that’s not my place to say that.
Also, keep doing CTFs and possibly join a security meetup group somewhere.
