You’ll quickly build a sense of confidence and be excited about your results. Work will become a 9-5 means to an end and all the weird stresses will wash over you because you feel good. You’ll look forward to waking up at 6am and going for a 10 mile run and will go to sleep early in anticipation.

After awhile, you’ll look at the people above you in the soulless corporation and realize they’ve wasted their 20s/30s climbing an arbitrary layer. I remember going into my first job at Amazon and calling my girlfriend, telling her “These are the richest, most miserable looking people I’ve ever seen”. I looked at the folks that were $SDE+2 and they were doing the same work, they just artificially cared more and would spend their evenings and weekends working.

If you don’t have kids then you’re lucky, you have more time to spend building yourself up.

I guarantee this will work but there is a really rough 1-3 month period before it kicks in.

Start today: do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and go run-walk for 20 minutes. Do that everyday, continuing to set goals. Rain or shine. Even when you feel sick, hungry, tired.

>> Start today: do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and go run-walk for 20 minutes. Do that everyday, continuing to set goals. Rain or shine. Even when you feel sick, hungry, tired.

Good lord man, I hope OP is a 20-something in fair shape. I started running later in life, and then working out. Dropping from a desk job to the ground to do 100 push ups or a 100 proper sit-ups if you have never done it is going to 100% motivate you to never do that again.

If OP wants to go exercise, and has never done so, go look up couch to 5k or start off with 10 proper push ups and 10 proper sit ups and then wait 10 mins and see if you can do 10 more. Do that three times. Give yourself some time to build that up.

This reply I am replying to has no idea what kind of shape OP is in. Don't go nuts on day one, you will spend a week (or two) recovering and this will demotivate you. (and I am no expert, perhaps call a trainer).

https://www.hybridcalisthenics.com/routine

Not only that, it will give you an injury that will take you weeks to recover from.

Even if it’s not exercise specifically. Find something else you can care about!

I’ve had this problem my entire career. I’m over invested in my work even when I don’t want to be and I can’t stop thinking about work (sometimes big things and some times minutiae) and it invaded my sleep. I’ve recently started a few activities that I believe are helping me separate from my work (and sleep at night). Here’s what I’m doing…

1) Exercising to a level I’m comfortable. For me that’s running a few miles a day and incorporating kettlebells, weights or med balls into my morning workout.

2) Reading books and simple puzzles like word search. I wanted to find an alternative to phone and social media - I think too much of that stuff sucks for mental well-being. Currently I’m reading Plato’s The Republic.

3) I started volunteering at my church. Churches and local institutions are suffering right now from lack of participation and have legit challenges to apply yourself to. So far this hasn’t kept me up at night or interrupted my sleep.

So I think the combined effect of these changes is that I’m out of my own head and applying myself to doing things other than using my personal time to marinate in my professional life. Oh and I’m no longer waking up at 3am every night unable to fall back to sleep.

Can confirm - I did this but also with 100 squats and a 10k run daily.

All of my hair fell out from the exertion, but I feel invincible.

Run 20K one day, get to take the next day off.

I’d be specially wary of your final suggestion. Not only is that goal too high for someone just starting, going for a run when it’s raining and you feel sick and tired borders on dangerous advice.

It is dangerous AND stupid. If you feel sick - rest. Otherwise you risk every potentially lethal ailment every sensible exercise counsel warns against.

While I don't disagree with this I find it interesting how people are so against working out while sick whereas the startup/hustle crowd are all about pushing through it working 24/7/365 even when you're sick. Hustle hustle hustle and all that.

Even outside of the startup hustle crowd many people still force themselves into work when they're feeling sick and tired. I would think forcing yourself to do a 8 hour day in the office plus a commute is more stress to the body then a short exercise routine. Nobody is seriously saying go and run a 5k when you feel like shit but some I often find when I feel under the weather doing some stretches and body weight exercises helps with aches and pains.

I think people are reading the original post a little too literally. I did not read it as drop and do 100 push ups right now! But to start by doing even just one press up and commit to doing that daily until you can do 100 push ups. 100 being any arbitrary number, 50 or 30 works just as well. The point is having a goal and maintaining daily improvement towards it.

But yeah don’t kill yourself, barring injury or fever, I don’t give myself any excuses.

Fully agree with your other advice though.

(Not saying that this is right for everybody.)

Just be aware that you can lose all hair

This doesn’t get talked about enough on HN but therapy is literally life changing.

The good ones are like a mechanic who can fully take an engine apart, lay out all the pieces, clean and replace broken parts, assemble the whole thing back together, and make adjustments to it until it runs like new.

You’ll be able to better understand why you did they things you did, why you currently emotionally respond how you do, and craft the tools necessary to in the future respond intentionally to your own environment.

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress with your first therapist. Try a new one. This is a highly intimate service and you deserve someone who is a good fit for you.

Instead of " can fully take an engine apart, lay out all the pieces, clean and replace broken parts, assemble the whole thing back together" many will (if you are luckily) charge you for new Blinker fluid and piston return springs (i.e do nothing) or if you are unlucky will take your engine apart and then put it back together with the wrong parts.

I went to a therapist because I started having very obvious anxiety attacks (and my life sucked generally) but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason down. They were able to immediately pinpoint the source of the anxiety attacks (abandonment issue) and I stopped having them immediately cause that’s all I needed to hear to get over it.

But when it came to trying to get over my chronic stress and malaise and overall shitty life/lifestyle? They had nothing. They were basically like - “well you are with the wrong partner, you were born poor, and you’re trying to live in the most expensive place in the world and do it on single income. Yeah - you’re gonna fucking suffer. Sorry I have literally no solutions except move away and give up - which obviously does nothing for you because you’d never be here if you were the type of person to ever give up career wise or in relationships.”

It was like talking to a brick wall for those issues. Great for specific trauma problems - terrible for anything more ambiguous. Which - to be fair - I really don’t think any therapist could solve. It’s why I don’t think I’ll ever go back. It doesn’t seem solvable by wishful thinking.

This is really good advice.

Therapy has many different “modalities” and therapy with one person can be veeery different than with someone else.

In doing that, I changed my perspective, in a way that I think may also be possible while still working as an employee. The only company I worry about now is me, my own business, my own career, my own success.

That’s not to say that I don’t want my clients to be successful, or that I don’t work my ass off trying to help them be successful, but I don’t worry if they aren’t. Why not? Because I understand that I have no control over them, no way to prevent them from making bad decisions, no way to prevent them from being managed poorly (as most companies are).

The problem is that employers want you to have an emotional stake in their success — to take personal responsibility for their success — but you ultimately have no control. That’s kind of the point of stock options — making you care the success of the company as a whole so you’ll work hard and stick around — but really you don’t have real control over the company’s success. And that dynamic — giving responsibility without control — is a classic sign of bad management.

So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves. Focus on the success of your personal business — how you do your assignments, the next step in your career, your mental and physical health, your family — and let the rest go.

I think this is a necessary attitude to adopt, even as an employee. You need to draw boundaries about what you care about, and one of those ways is to evaluate if people you work with actually care about something or if they only say they care about it. If you're not responsible for it and others don't really care, you should also try to not care.

I'll give a concrete example. I worked on a project recently where I was dependent on somebody else to finish something. They are perceived as a somewhat competent but lazy person and they took a very long time to get it done. Certainly much longer than other people would have done. Despite claims from our management that this was urgent, no additional people were added to that task to speed it up. Actions speak louder than words - if it really was urgent they would have asked somebody else to do it. So when my part was delayed I simply said I was blocked and tried my best to let it go and not get frustrated.

I had a major burnout years ago and one of the big reasons was because I took responsibility for my management layer understaffing projects that were supposedly a top priority. The priorities were always talk, but no action to add people or manage expectations with the user/customer(s). It look me years to realize that instead of fully putting the blame on my management, I should have stood up for myself and said I can only do what I can do and that's it.

>So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves.

100% Agree. You can strive to do the best you can do so you don't feel like you, personally, are doing a half-baked job. But beyond that, it's not your problem anymore.

Changing your perspective and worrying about yourself as a business is the best thing to do.

you're right, thanks

> How can I just stop caring?

Don't. Your ability to care is the only thing that separates you from a dumb machine. In the future that skill will be a most valuable asset if you want work in a world of "AI".

Don't confuse stress with caring. Use your care to fight the machine and the idiots, and if you can't win then kill the shitty job, not your precious capacity to care. Take your care somewhere more deserving.

Imagine that tomorrow your job changes. All your old projects are cancelled, and your new project requires you to remotely supervise an automated sawmill. You have a dozen camera views, five ways to unjam the machine, and something that needs a little bit of attention from you once every five minutes or so. Your pay and benefits remain the same. The hours are fixed: if you do the job competently, you get a five minute break once an hour, an hour for lunch, and a 15 minute break in mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

After a day or two, there is nothing of intellectual interest here. Nothing will change. Your work is necessary, but it does not march towards any goal other than the total wood sawn at the end of the day.

How does this change you?

You are definitely without useful autonomy. You are a cog in a machine. You don't work with anyone, really. It is not going to be fulfilling.

But this is so different, because you don't have the expectation that somehow, this remote wood-cutting work is supposed to fulfill you. You will need to define yourself in other terms: as a person who is part of their community, who has interests and hobbies outside of work.

The hard part is the deep understanding that work is not life, and that your feeling that work is supposed to address your non-material needs is orthogonal to the reality of work.

There are jobs that connect you more deeply to your community, or try to fix the world as a whole. But on a daily basis, they still involve tasks that are not intrinsically fulfilling.

The meaning is what you put into it.

* Become less dependent on your employer (build a public profile. Blog, speak, etc).

* Put yourself in a financial position where you can weather whatever storms come up (layoffs, bad bosses, drama, etc)

* Interview more, at least get in the practice of it. Think of it more as having conversations to understand the possibilities, then hard commitments. You will screw up many of these, (I know I have!). Luckily there's always more fish in the sea.

* Remember _they need you_ - software developers aren't exactly growing on trees these days. They need you to be a viable business as much as you need them for your income.

* Set boundaries - people just need to be told no, what you won't deal with, etc. This helps ensure you're not internalizing what's really an external problem. An imperfect boundary is better than never setting boundaries.

* Try to find/remember that small nugget of 'positive' stuff you enjoy about your work. I remember how much I enjoy building software and try to edit out the rest. Focus on cultivating that, try to put your energy there and not the noise. You are where you put your time.

* Behavioral activation - if you have a hard time doing a task, literally just getting started helps you get more interested in it.

* Remember it's usually not about you - whatever frustration you experience at work, it's probably systemic and something other people deal with. Not about targeting you personally. This can help you roll your eyes at whatever politics and drama and move on.

* Find peers that feel the same. To the last point, if you have a peer group, you can compare notes and figure out what problems are systemic, or maybe about the personality of a boss, etc.

* Know its imperfect. We're human. Despite the best advice, therapy, mindfulness, and preparation we will still sometimes get caught up in it. We're all works in progress. Don't be too hard on yourself.

I really need to emphasize how wrong this is. Your employer definitely doesn’t need you unless you’re working for an exceptionally small company/org where you can hold them hostage/ransom.

You are dime a dozen in the real world. The only reason you’ll ever get a sense that they “need you” is because you are being chronically underpaid and you are so incredibly cheap that just talking to you for 30 minutes to do X is way more efficient than paying you the 3x you’re worth.

I’ve seen engineers being paid 7 figures thrown away over trivial bullshit. You’re not needed.

> But my personality finds it difficult to ignore things that are wrong

That's what you think. Maybe you are a man-child throwing a tantrum? The tech world is filled with such folks.

Even if everything you said is accurate, you will be happier if you dont play the victim card.

Running around thinking that everyone else is the problem is never a recipe for success. My favorite thought whenever I feel myself slipping into that mode is to think 'do I want to be right or effective'. It immediately puts me in an in control, empathetic, problem solving mindset.

With that in mind, write down what you want out of your life and job and set some simple easy to achieve short term objectives. They might be health or learning related. Then go out and do them. This will build motivation to actually deal with the issue which is the job sucks and you need to change it. Write down criteria for your new job and spend your time finding it. Don't just jump on the first thing.

It's really important to get yourself together mentally before you jump ship though because it's very easy to end up in exactly the same situation or worse if you make a rash uncalculated decision.

The technique worked so well, that I've continued doing it even after the situation resolved itself. To date, I still keep a strict boundary time for when to stop work and switch to the side project every day. I spend about 4hrs of my day on the side project and about 8-10 hours on professional work. I find myself being really productive and yet not getting exhausted by what would otherwise be grinding 14-hour days.

And once a year I take an entire month off, and leave my work phone/computer at home while I go on vacation.

Ok so, moving beyond the staggering premise, let's look at the source of the problem - answer the question: why do you care?

- you care because you're invested - physically, man hours, mentally, emotionally, describe these and be honest with the situation.

- you care because it defines you - it's your baby, it's your everything

- I can't think of a third one

Either case, you have to let go of it. Find a way of letting go. Work is work, therefor nothing should be personal. It's a transaction of work, effort, time against money. I know there is more to it, but imagine swapping job with someone random in the world for a day, that's that.

Secondly, nothing is ever yours at work, it is property of some company, or an IP of an entity. You're far more than your work. The knowledge, the experience, the resilience, the care you have for it is irreplaceable and no one can take that away from you.

As for actionable, try pretend you don't work there anymore. You're just on some retainer, some maintenance contract. Mentally check out of the nonsense of your colleagues, because, it's just that.

Set up timers on your phone for breaks at brunch, lunch, afternoon tea and clock out time, follow by them as much as possible. Make work work for you and not the other way around.

At the end of the day, you're replaceable, the work is just money and those dickwads aren't family. I'm being blunt but it sounds like you need a bit of that.

Slight alteration on your "because you are invested," there can just be a sense of responsibility.

I was at the DMV last week and I took over some front desk duties because it needed doing. There was only one front desk person with everyone else hidden behind partitions. They left for like 20 minutes and a line was getting crazy and people were confused and worried.

I stood up got everyone's attention and repeating what I heard earlier, "Hey, I don't work here but I don't like this chaos. If you do not have an appointment, please wait in the line outside. If you do, please come over here and take a picture of this qr code to get your ticket number and look to the teleprompter to see when your number is called."

People burst out smiling with relief and organized to take the qr pics. I was seen shorty thereafter.

To help out on that: Try to understand how an INTJ personality works [e.g. 1, 2]. (The OP seems to be one judging by what was written here).

Just imagine there are people who hate nothing more than "things that are wrong". But almost everything created by humans is very, very wrong, on all possible axes (that's actually the definition of "the human factor", imperfection). Also those people hate it when others tell them how to do things; especially as the people who think that they can tell others how to do something are almost anytime wrong anyway. (Most people are wrong with almost everything in life because most humans aren't able to think logically and just repeat something they saw somewhere without ever thinking about it; humans are apes, never forget).

For an INTJ there is no option to "stop thinking" about the wrong things that surround them. There is only "fix it or die trying".

For the OP this would mean that all that they can do is to leave the current place for one where things are less wrong. Otherwise the current situation could indeed kill them in the long run, or at least completely destroy their mental health (something that would take many years to fix again if even possible).

(There is btw. a salient overlap between the percentages of occurrence and personal traits of INTJ personalities and personal traits associated with people on the autism spectrum, at least when it comes to the high-functioning "light" autism variants. Autistic people generally dislike "change". That could be the reason why it's so difficult for people with such personality traits to just leave a place that has obvious negative effects on them. But that's only my personal theory at the moment; never tried to investigate whether there is research that could confirm this relation).

[1] https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality [2] https://www.truity.com/personality-type/INTJ

You need something else. The job needs to fade away when you leave work. If you are single, then pick some type of workout. Family people tend to concentrate more on the family. Pick something that excites you. If this isn't clicking then get a therapist. You need a mental tuneup. If that thought offends, then remember a lot of successful people do this. Sports have coaches that provide the same function.

The funny part is that you will be better at the job because problems will be in the back of your mind when you do other things and you will be healthier.

Apparently the way to handle intrusive or nagging thoughts are mainly two ways.

The first way is to realize that thoughts come and go. They are backround noise. Not every weird thought, or worry, that pops in your head is "you". One can observe the thoughts, from a mental distance, without judgement, without owning them.

The second way is to actively distract yourself. Either by doing something that occupies your full attention. Or, not following a line of thought, conciously, actively thinking about something else. You can try to make it a habit of not actively thinking too much about the things you cannot change. Instead, actively think about the things you CAN change.

Beyond that, if you want to care less about work, my advice is to fill your life with things that matters to you outside of work.

If you only have work in your life (I am non-judgementally assuming that is the case, sorry if I am wrong), your life will be awesome if work is going great, and hell if it is not. By adding more pillars in the form of hobbies, sports, romance, friendships, side projects, you increase the chance of turning a “my work sucks” into “my work sucks but my training for sport XYZ has been going pretty great recently”. And maybe later it is the opposite way around.

I call those things pillars because they help you bear the weight of your life. The more and the stronger, the easier the load.

With that said, the “patch” I've used back when I was in a similar situation was actually to care about the “smaller” things in my work. That is, things that aren't unimportant but are often overlooked. I don't know what job you have, but as a developer, I was able to start experimenting with how we do testing and deploys, improve documentation, think about how I would refactor the codebase if I had the chance. That gave me “internal autonomy”, so to say. Making sure that my skills that can't really be developed would at least not degrade. That helped a lot when I finally quit and found a job with much more autonomy. Finally being able to “do it right” while also having the way to “do it right” right there with me.

Notice one thing, the job did pay well enough so money wasn't a concern there.

You cannot exist in an environnement where you feel used, where you dread social interactions and where you find the whole structure of the job baffling and inefficient.

You have outgrown this job, and you need to find another one. If I were you, I would look around either for similar jobs or for jobs that are just a little over your current capabilities.

I've found that these feelings of being very critical of your environnenent come from being underchallenged and understimulated.

As unnerving as this sounds, and as dumb as this comment is, have fun with it! I'm sure you are a competent and intelligent person. Just bet on yourself, and look for a way to safely find another job.

There is no shame in going on welfare for a bit to look for better work. It's your money! :)

The big bang rewrite of your brain isn't a possibility just like it isn't one for codebases. Viewing the riddle this way will let you put the fun part of your profession in the driver's seat. What will you change to make the 'impossible' possible?

> I already stopped caring about my work. But my personality finds it difficult to ignore things that are wrong. Sometimes I look at other colleagues communication with others and it affects me also, I see so much wrong but I can't do anything about it

This is a red flag that the issue isn’t actually your work. If you’re getting worked up by reading other people talking about work that isn’t related to yourself, something else is going on.

You shouldn’t be losing sleep and getting depressed because you aren’t in control of what other people are doing on other projects. You must learn to focus on your work.

Being too controlling of what others are doing around you is a serious problem. No company is going to encourage or enable this behavior, especially when you’ve already given up caring about your own work as you said. In fact, this is something that managers have to proactively shut down or even manage out of the company: It’s no good to have busybodies who can’t care about their own work but won’t stop interfering with other people doing their work. It’s a net negative for everyone involved, and net negative people tend to get fired eventually (rightly so) for the health of the team.

You need to learn to focus on your work and ignore what other people are doing. Acknowledge that you have a major control problem that needs to be addressed.

It sounds kind of stupid, but the thing that really let me know that my anxiety was gone was when I realised I could smoke a lot of weed without any anxiety, which before would have been ridiculous, since I always panicked at the bodily sensations. Of course, meditation helps you learn to accept with equanimity a wider range of sensations that come up. Again, it did not help with my depression as much though.

Same here. Meditation cured it.

I lost my taste for weed tho.

I do dry vipassana every day.

Biggest thing I ever found.

Used to do concentration+vipassana, but that's too trippy for my lifestyle.

Vipassana is basically the same as shikantaza. As I see it, we've got 2 techniques. Then a dozen or so twists, combinations and names, depending on the tradition.

Have you tried a seiza bench? It's easier on the knees. Really comfy actually. Here's some info on that.

http://fleen.org/sit (the top 2 pics)

http://fleen.org/bench

Apparently some Tibetan Buddhists are all about seiza on a bench. The top students inherit the master's bench and such.

So it isnt just for stifflegged westerners. Ancient wizards think it's cool too.

Questions that I would explore with a therapist after reading your post - my two cents:

Is the actual work or the people that are draining me?

Why don’t I feel autonomy - is it a micromanaging boss or do I need a lot of freedom? How does my coworker feel about the situation?

How was my last employer?

Why do I have difficulties accepting things that are wrong?

Depending on how you answer these questions you can take different actions. Maybe you’ll find a new perspective that makes you situation more manageable. Maybe you’ll find old habits that you can change.

I wish you the best of luck!

A: I'm desperate for the income or health insurance B: I've got no or little fulfilment outside of the job

With A a solution is to accept the need and act to slowly remove the need.

With B a solution is to get out and live. Do things that obligate you to be present, and out of your head. Echoing the comment about exercise, but make it fun. Play games with friends, play with dogs, even if you don't have one, explore a big park, jump in cold water. Anything to shake out your head, not as a solution, rather as it's own joy. Anything that you would enjoy even on the day your job flies out the window.

That might not be a great feeling, but it goes both ways. Treat them as your source of income, nothing more.

But at some point I was thrown into a situation where I lost a 10 year old relationship, and had to rebuild my life from scratch, and realized that for me, caring for my work environment was mostly because I had a stable and nice environment at home, and needed to take on challenges and risks somewhere, so naturally the workplace provided such an outlet.

Once I was “alone” I suddenly could take much more risks and excitement from my personal life, so work became not that important - got a sailing license, a motorbike license, traveled the world, started latin dances, stuff like that - things that I always wanted to do, but dismissed as “too risky to even attempt”.

I guess I will always have a “risk appetite” where I express it though is up to me. So far I like where my life is going :)

Identify the things you can help with, and the things you can't. Reserve your energy for the best opportunities to make a difference.

Also, you could do your own personal project for a while. I did some of those and realised that I'm almost 100% happy with the personal project, and I think I'm happy not because it's perfect, because I control everything to my satisfaction. Now at work I think "I've already proven that I can do something that I feel is perfect, so it doesn't matter that this is (very) imperfect, it's just outside my control."

Finally, another thing I've been thinking recently, is "find the fun in everything". Work is part of my life and I want to enjoy my life, so for any task I think about what parts of the task are enjoyable as I'm doing the task. Just thinking about and identifying what is fun about any task makes it better.

If so: introduce and start enforcing Scrum. If agile is not in the DNA of your company Scrum offers a way to force an Agile process withing your company. With Scrum you (and your team) can gain autonomy over the development process. It allows you to create a clear separation of responsibilities towards whomever is using you as a resource. You own the development process. They own the business process. Turn the tables: start pushing them to have their business processes in order (Scrum gives you many options). Demand proper business requirements.

But there's a but: Some developers exactly prefer not to have ownership. They just want to work from 9 to 5 and have them handed a list of to-do's that they can work on. This is where development themselves gives away autonomy.

I try to remind myself that even if things are wrong, poor design, bad technology direction dictated from on high, even apathetic or stubborn colleagues, etc., I continue to try to find as much wiggle room as I can to make it as not terrible as possible, and never stop advocating for a better approach. I have found that repeating yourself enough, with evidence and data, eventually leads to others repeating it back to you as some new idea. It is a long game approach, but it does not fill that immediate change/feedback desire.

Ultimately you choose to change your company, or change your company. It is up to you to choose which one is worth your time investment.

You say you stopped caring, but you are still stressing. You should look at that a bit.

Other advice here seems solid, other activities will make work seem like what it is, exchanging your time for money.

Part of it is it takes time to adjust. I went from a place where we tried to make software really perfect, to a start up I reported a bug and the CEO told me not to fix it. (In our meeting he assigned it low priority. He said he could see it was bothering me but reiterated to leave it be. He was right, but it hard for me not to care.

Thinking that the decisions are wrong ignores the fact that the people you work with probably aren't idiots. Remember that most of the time you're operating with on incomplete information if you're not being asked to make decisions. You're asked to complete tasks, but not given the information that drives the decisions about which tasks to do or how to do them. Consequently from your perspective the wrong decisions are being made, but if you had all the data you might not feel that way.

You need to learn to trust your colleagues, or get into a position where you're being asked to voice an opinion on what's being done. Then you'll still care but at least you'll know why.

Caring is humbling. It helps you see the damage your actions and attitude cause people. I doubt you walk around flipping off your coworkers and knocking their plants over, I'm saying all of us affect people around us in bad ways if we're not mindful of ourselves.

What would it take for you to found a company? You could go big, like pitch a business idea to investors, or turn yourself into a one-man consultancy at an exorbitant hourly rate.

I have a buddy who did the latter. He'll take a boring C# gig for 6 months, amass a pile of savings, and live off of it for a while, while he paints his house and fiddles with IoT projects. It's more risk, but it can buy you more freedom.

I'm a big believer in reducing productivity if you've been at a place for a while, especially if they ain't giving you a pay raise. Missed deadlines and missed meetings start to create a pattern that they can't take you for granted.

That could lead to more responsibility or autonomy for you within the company.

Alternatively the company might start to view you as a troublemaker which would possibly result in a worse workplace environment, however since you already feel miserable I think it is worth the risk. Just don't mention to anyone you work how much you don't care for working there.

The only cure I'm aware that works reliable is to quit. Alternatively, reading up about work-burnout could be an idea. Meditation, working out, eating and living healthy, and being mindful about your thoughts when you're /not/ at work (for example just, dismissing thoughts and feelings about work as "not useful" or asking them politely to go away) could work.

If you're too deep in, where the burn-out have many similarities with a severe depression, it's probably safest to see a therapist, like some others suggest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHxwY3Fz2gU

Seriously, though. I don't know how to stop caring because I've never cared. I only care about things outside of work. My friends, family, myself, our health, our society, the world, my hobbies and interests. Work is a thing I only do because I must in order to survive in this capitalist system that I would prefer to be overthrown. I am so brazen that I have openly expressed this attitude to my employers.

If I had cared and tried harder I probably could have had much more money, but I have plenty. More than most. If the company I work for fails, who cares? Not my responsibility or problem. I work according to what is written in my job description, and that's it. Work is a purely transactional relationship.

Change your perspective. Instead of focusing on the things that are wrong that you can't fix, focus on the things that you did fix, or that you have a good chance of fixing in the near future. They may be small things, but at least you can leave the world a little better you found it every day.

I believe that's a wrong mentality, hence that's actually how my Ph.D. advisior does to me and its pretty painful on my end. My advisor does exactly your advice as he just stop caring about me and focus on his projects success. Probably he thinks that "I have no power over my student's success or process so I just stop being responsible about it to be not stress out.".

I think you have power over to help others and communicate the way you feel about your situation right away.

Your advisor has the power to help you, yet chooses not to. That's a different issue.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Warning: "stop caring" is such a broad term, it can mean too much. I have stopped caring in the sense that I know that the outcome I want isn't always the choosen one. That doesn't mean I have stopped caring about fix some stuff.

There are options here. You can take a simplistic approach where everything is defined by higher forces - God(s).

Alternatively, you can believe in a highly complex world with ever-increasing entropy, but nevertheless, an organized and predictable world defined by the laws of physics.

In both scenarios, there is no free will, hence no responsibility.

Sounds miserable. Hoe does that help, even if true? Having agency and feeling in control is great, and boosts self esteem.

“not caring” is miserable.

you cared about being smart

now you got to find a way to love yourself regardless of external judgement

deep problem you have

therapy and exercise is the way

Then imagine that you disappear one day and think how quickly they will replace you.

Noone will cry for you except a couple of friends and your family. The rest will be like "he was an ok guy, whats for lunch"

> I don't have any autonomy. I'm treated as a resource to be "used"

> quitting or finding another job is NOT an option

This is what Karl Marx called alienation of labor. Workers like yourself feel the way you do. Whereas opposed to this is your employers, and perhaps others of or aligned to their class (perhaps some even here) who have class interests opposed to ypurs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienatio...

Do your bit within your allotted work hours, and leave it at that. It's just work.

In my early twenties I felt super bad about leaving my first ever corporate job for a step up in life.

My boss pulled me aside and said “Dwolb, once you walk out of here, the people here won’t care about you for more than 5 days let alone 5 minutes.”

Totally changed my perspective on work and work relationships.

Still, it's just work. I remember walking back into the store where I worked 6, and half the staff being fresh faces. The people might remember you, but the company won't.

That's like telling someone with depression "to just be happy".

IMO there's no other way to give less fuck but by staying in the pressure cooker & start growing thicker skin

That said-just focus on the things that you are good at. Not caring about a task is a good sign that it could be automated out of your life altogether.

I hope you get better. I'm still struggling with it, a year after stopping work.

Can you put effort into questioning that baseline assumption?