While not wanting to make light of this (which is clearly something that Daniel Fernandez is agonising over, and I hope he can work out the best way forward and get good advice), I had to chuckle at the Gormally-Lalic Pit of Despair (GLAPOD) bit!
If it helps, I have always liked his (Fernandez's) writings on chess, and have enjoyed his articles and other musings. It is always refreshing to have people who write about more than just the chess, and give context to what they are writing about.
It may not help much, but I did wonder what was meant by "career I jettisoned a few months ago" and the reference to training as a counsellor at Roehampton (I am vaguely familiar with that university, living in that general area of London). I know Daniel studied at Cambridge (I don't know what subject) and that he had trained as a "time series analyst" (this is from his quite old now
ChessBase author profile). The general impression I get (I should say here, I don't know Daniel personally) is that he has a lot of interests and this can conflict with the "do something impactful with my life" bit that he said - unless you are a genuine polymath and can be brilliant at lots of things, it is difficult to be really good at more than one thing (though on re-reading, I think maybe he means training in a career that involves helping others, as opposed to scaling the heights in chess).
Having said that, you don't have to focus on a single area to be impactful. It is possible to develop portfolios in various areas and build slowly. I am saying that as someone (and I don't usually talk about this on this forum) who chose to start a new 'career' during the pandemic. I say career in quote marks as this involved a return to university (to a completely different subject to the one I studied many years earlier) and while difficult at times it was absolutely the right thing to do and has set me off in new directions (some of which are still developing).
I was trying to think of a suitable way to end this post, but will just say that life-long learning (by which I mean ongoing study) is something that chess players do in some sense engage in, though I may be stretching the concept a bit there. Top-level chess players probably see their ongoing studying of chess more as "work" and "career development" than "learning". Or maybe they just see it as trying to understand chess!
