I can only empathise
I wish you well in your endeavours. Being an airline pilot was all I ever wanted to do from the age of 5, ended up in a well paid IT career and then decided to follow the dream in my early thirties. I was well paid and well rested in my old IT career and crucially I was off at the same time as my wife and child. I enjoyed my leisure time because I wasn't feeling completely exhausted after work and at weekends.
Eight years of regional/low cost aviation has been a variety of highs and lows - on a good day with an amiable colleague it's more enjoyable than my old IT life for sure, but the rosters are unbelievably fatiguing and it's my belief that the workload is detrimental to health, wellbeing, a family life and safety. I still don't earn what I earned as a lower level IT manager in 2002!!
Like many of you I'm tired of feeling knackered and feeling 'owned' by my employer, I am trying to go part time while also exploring quitting the rat race and starting a business - maybe a B&B or some kind of property investment/rental thing that means I can work at home, determine my own hours, be with my family e.g. when Daughter comes home from school, have time to exercise, read, relax - basically something that gives me a high quality of life in return for a modest income. As I work for a regional airline the money's not too hard to beat!!
If I knew then what I know now I'd have skipped the expenditure at Oxford and gone straight for the property investment and then taken a share in a Europa or something to toodle around in. Quite frankly I wouldn't miss the flying at all, the work life balance is appalling and the profession has gone down the tubes financially unlike IT, Consulting, medicine, law, accounting where you can still enjoy a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle and stay in a country you want to live in.