Yes, you don't need anyone's permission to be sad.

I enjoy the act of coding, but my ambition to create almost always exceeded my ability and the number of hours in the day. So the transition from coder (and sometimes manager) to agent orchestrator has been fairly positive.

It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.

>But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right?

How does being sad help anyone?