Things are much better than you think.
It’s very often not about what you know and that you have to know everything, it’s about cultivating the mindset of being a problem solver and not being afraid of new and unknown problems because the only guarantee in programming is that you absolutely will stumble upon those and will have to learn the solutions as you go.
That’s one of the top reasons why we are paid a lot. If I were to become a car mechanic I can bet a hefty sum that I can learn 99% of every potential repair edge case in 2 years of interning at a popular and busy place.
Programming will never give you that; you have to keep your eyes open as you solve problems and finding the common threads among them. That’s why formal computer science education is actually important.
Be at ease. You can still explore – I still do even after 22 years of programming – but you have to be curious and not going full throttle and burning yourself out because that’s going to hit you VERY HARD at one point; you’ll hate the job and you’ll even start hating programming as a hobby. From then on it’s game over for you if you can’t take a 2-3 years of vacation and go on a literal and metaphorical self-discovery journey which, you guessed it, most people cannot financially afford.
