How am I doing? My income/expenses after falling from grace

I’m 29 and until last year for the previous 5 years I was earning around 4.6M as an engineer in cybersecurity. I began my career in 2018 in a finance company which paid me a little better for a 新卒 as a software engineer in python. That company went bankrupt and was forced to look for a job with just 5 months of experience. Landed in a well known Japanese company as an application engineer in their cybersecurity department.

Unfortunately those years during and after corona were pure hell for me psychologically speaking and never got really to stick to one area or develop my skills. I also didn’t find it particularly interesting to keep pursuing it. Last year I reached a pretty bad burnout point and decided to leave without a job lined up and took a break of a month and a half in my country. Came back and went through 5 months of unemployment facing the consequences of not growing in any particular area. I didn’t know what I even wanted, I just applied at anything that got remotely closed to my past experience.

Eventually landed in a dispatch company in June that sent me to work with AI researchers since July. It’s fully remote and I’m really liking what Im learning in machine learning. But the salary is absolutely peanuts from my dispatch company. Every recruiter I talk gets shocked when they see my salary saying I should be earning at least 5M with my experience and the N2 level I recently passed. Should I apply for jobs now if I’m looking to get out of this misery hole even if my current job experience is not that long? I’m also doing my best getting used to this salary which has forced me to learn a lot of person finance / budgeting which I never did before. But I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long. It’s not fun not being able to travel again and do other stuff I enjoy because money.

I’m 29 and until last year for the previous 5 years I was earning around 4.6M as an engineer in cybersecurity. I began my career in 2018 in a finance company which paid me a little better for a 新卒 as a software engineer in python. That company went bankrupt and was forced to look for a job with just 5 months of experience. Landed in a well known Japanese company as an application engineer in their cybersecurity department.

Unfortunately those years during and after corona were pure hell for me psychologically speaking and never got really to stick to one area or develop my skills. I also didn’t find it particularly interesting to keep pursuing it. Last year I reached a pretty bad burnout point and decided to leave without a job lined up and took a break of a month and a half in my country. Came back and went through 5 months of unemployment facing the consequences of not growing in any particular area. I didn’t know what I even wanted, I just applied at anything that got remotely closed to my past experience.

Eventually landed in a dispatch company in June that sent me to work with AI researchers since July. It’s fully remote and I’m really liking what Im learning in machine learning. But the salary is absolutely peanuts from my dispatch company. Every recruiter I talk gets shocked when they see my salary saying I should be earning at least 5M with my experience and the N2 level I recently passed. Should I apply for jobs now if I’m looking to get out of this misery hole even if my current job experience is not that long? I’m also doing my best getting used to this salary which has forced me to learn a lot of person finance / budgeting which I never did before. But I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long. It’s not fun not being able to travel again and do other stuff I enjoy because money.