And a crazy good social safety net. If you're having any sort of difficulty(ranging from depression to bankruptcy), you'll get adequate state support(income, subsidised housing and healthcare) for a long time. I wonder why more people don't start businesses there, given that it's seldom fatal to risk and fail..
I’d guess because the people who really have the money to start a business aren’t poor enough to worry about having to live on the street if it fails. Also, perhaps the strength of the safety net makes people feel less of a need to be entrepreneurial.
Same thing is happening to me, just started my PhD in one of the leading robotics labs, and I feel like I don't belong there. It's beginning to cause insomnia and depression, or symptoms of those.
Early in my PhD I went to a big NSF event with a bunch of young researchers, so senior students and junior faculty. This NSF event did a "speed dating" event (quickly re-named at the last minute to "rapid fire cross collaboration" because of the sexist connotations of calling something "speed dating," natch) and when talking with other researchers about how I didn't feel like I belonged, either at this event or in research in general, one said "well, belong or not, what matters is that you are here now."
That's a tough spot. Talk to someone about it - therapist, a mentor, a trusted friend. Especially if any of those people have some knowledge of the things you're doing so their perspective beyond generic "no ciumonk, you're great" support.
The sooner you do the better.
I had to take a break from my studies because as things got worse, I told myself if I just pushed harder I could get through it on my own. That didn't work out.
I'm so sorry for you. I have no solution for that. To me you'd probably look like a worthy mind, a good student and colleague. Are there other new hires in the company ? or is it mentioned from older employees ?
Also, with a bit of mental training (say meditative thinking) you can tame some of this effects. I know I now can recognize when my brain take an unnecessary turn and can slow down. It's far from perfect but it helps. Don't think it's unavoidable, get fun time, stop listening to the fears too much.
"I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that there is already a very large market of people who like to tinker with cars. Imagine a self-driving Delorean"
Or my own version, a level 3-ish self-driving 1977 VW Rabbit :)
"You can refuse to compromise on your rates, provided that you can afford to walk away if necessary"
I also wanted to move away from so-called freelancing, but in the end I discovered that it gives me incredible flexibility: I now cherry-pick my clients, taking only projects that are challenging and truly stimulating. I charge a very high hourly rate but I also put my soul into the project, and in the end the clients are more than happy with the work. This allows me to work for ~4 months/year(in blocks, of course), and the rest of the year is spent on personal projects, travelling and building (self-driving)race cars. Try to find your niche and go for it, it's really worth trying!
Made an autonomous vehicle out of a VW Golf/Rabbit, in around 2 weeks.
Custom built hardware, including the actuators.
Custom built RTOS on micro nodes.
Driving via openCV, hough transforms for lane detection, stereovision and flows for obstacles, surf/etc for traffic signs(don't ask, I was learning)on a stack of 2 laptops connected via gigabit ethernet.
Nicest thing: I got the models trained mainly without moving the car, by pumping the framebuffer of two racing/car games, rFactor and GTA3 through glcs to openCV and controlling the games via uinput to make a virtual city to drive in.
Don't have a lot of pics, here's some HW:
http://imgur.com/9cfzbMv ( yes, that's an old cordless drill and an angle grinder head with a bespoke bike chain :) )
http://imgur.com/5x9T9gi (piston is weirdly offset so I could still put my foot on the brake in emergencies, like that one time i smashed it into a fence...)
http://imgur.com/Ig7MaLT (notice how I kept the costs down to almost nothing, in this case the air distributor for the brakes made with Meccano and old air valves and a geared motor, since I didn't have the funds to buy anything)
