Yea, you need to FIRE. This is exactly the story told by dozens of FIRE bloggers who were either burned out by intense jobs or bored to death by dead-end jobs. Your place is where their motivation came from.
I too have a cheese job that pays me decently, has great benefits, and offers extraordinary stability. However, it is a slacker job. I'd quit to pursue higher pay and higher responsibilities, but this job enabled me to become a millionaire in my 40s while casually working a 40-hour week. They even ended my commute when the pandemic started. It's hard to jump from that into the 70-hour-week "advancement" hell that gave the last employee a heart attack. But it's also a bit dull to spend my life in the vocational equivalent of preschool.
Here are some ideas I've pursued over the last several years:
1) If job optimization is not possible, orient your energy toward lifestyle optimization. Find ways to be more frugal and increase your family's savings rate. Find ways to optimize your investments and taxes. How can you insert more exercise into your life? How can you improve your family's diet so you all live longer lives? How many opportunities can you seize to have impactful 5-minute conversations with each of your kids? Can you plan a destination family picnic from work? The stability and predictability of your job could be the asset that allows you to plow energy into the part of your life that matters.
2) Work outside your job description. Most jobs do not come with a built-in advancement plan. Thus advancement occurs when people volunteer for new activities outside their normal role. Analysts become managers by taking a leading role on a committee. Directors become executives by offering to do work for executives. Etc. What kind of work are other people doing that you'd like to try? Just ask them if you can try it. Similarly, be open to people you could mentor to backfill your job.
3) Could you blunt the dullness of work by listening to audiobooks? Maybe just in the downtimes? If you can get engaged with these, then work becomes the place you treat yourself to something you enjoy. If they teach new skills that will allow you to do new things professionally, that may be even better.
4) Play politics. Yes, we left-brained introverts* have a hard time with schmoozing, alliance-building, persuasion, and soliciting credit, but (a) these activities are actually critical to the functioning of any organization of humans, and (b) it could allow us analytical types to broaden our perspectives, increase our social intelligence, and make our task-driven lives more interesting. Maybe spend some time cultivating friendships at work. Even if you never use them to advance your career, it will be more rewarding than sitting and performing isolated tasks all day. Learning the motives and habits of your leaders is interesting in itself. *did I guess it right?
5) Get into Art/Music. Can you doodle a drawing on a piece of paper while someone bloviates on a Zoom call? Can you listen to new music at work? Maybe write a poem in OneNote?
6) Redefine your values. What's important? What must your accomplish in your brief lifetime? These answers change from year to year, and as kids grow, and as things are accomplished. If you've been unable to self-examine for a while, maybe now's the time. There is no shortage of people trying to persuade you to pick the path they think is best, and you could let them persuade you. Some of these suggestions are bunk (e.g. join my cult) and others are good ideas (e.g. help us create X so that benefit Y can be achieved). Ultimately you are accountable for having a meaning, whether you self-invent or buy someone else's meaning off the shelf. If you don't have something to FIRE for, you'll not do what's necessary to FIRE, and your life will continue to consist of meaninglessly shuffling between working and consuming. Your existential crisis is trying to tell you that your life needs this thing.
Thanks a lot, these are many concrete things.
Still, I feel like I'd tried most of them at some point and always somehow failed, returning to my usual misery.
I feel I am constantly living in the following loop:
1. Feel vaguely miserable about everything
2. Start feeling a massive amount of self-loathing over feeling so vaguely miserable in what is a very privileged situation
3. Start seeing actual consequences of the fact 90% of my mental capacities is dedicated to this spiral of misery - become tired, underperform, snap at kids, eat too much, sleep too much, sleep to little, whatever
4. Come back to 1 with even more intensity, which leads to an even more extreme episode of 2, leading to more of 3 and so it goes on.
It's like it takes a massive amount of effort to do anything constructive, but it takes very, very little for everything to go into a downward spiral that becomes harder and harder to break out of.
I mean, I am fully aware how ridiculous some of my excuses for not being able to do anything are, but the truth is, my brain always finds a way to ground itself in them and refuse to budge. A therapist I talked to pointed that out, he said that I use an impressive amount of mental gymnastics to make sure I stay miserable and I agree, but I don't see how I could just magically snap out of it. To me, or at least the emotional part of my brain that somehow always manages to sabotage the rational part, these things make some kind of perfect sense.
I blame my childhood for a lot of this because I grew up in a family that was emotionally and financially abusive and I think this attacks from two sides. One is that I was always led to believe that my own happiness was both unachievable and irrelevant. My parents never seemed to see me as a person but rather a prop in their own story, a provider of free labor of sorts. I grew up in a rural area in Eastern Europe and that's how it tends to be there. But at the same time, those same parents were fairly educated people who were quite hung up on their own quest for happiness and the conviction they deserved it, and a lot of the toxic atmosphere I grew up in was coming from their utter selfishness and sole focus on doing what they wanted to do at a given point in time, with constant accusations that my very existence was a hinder in this pursuit. I am pretty sure that this is what ultimately led me to the place where I can't really articulate what could possibly make me feel better than I do now but also make the prospect of even trying rather terrifying, as I can't be entirely certain that I wouldn't suddenly find myself at odds with the interests of my children.
Rationally I am fully aware that I am far far from the immature, trashy self-indulgence of my father, but somewhere deep inside I feel less sure. I know how ridiculous it is that I would subject myself to 20 years of unhappiness because my employer will very generously pay for the university education of my kids (especially as I live in Europe, that is not something that is otherwise unattainable by any means) but to me, in my anxiety, this makes some kind of perfect effin sense.
But also, I really don't think the job is at fault here. Sure, it's not a perfect job, but as far as jobs go, mine is really kinda fine. And it's not like I have a clear idea that there is something else I would rather be doing. I think above all I need an attitude adjustment but for some reason, no matter how much effort I put into it, I can be triggered by something completely menial and instantly spiral into my misery loop.
What kind of medication should I even bring up with a psychiatrist? I remember discussing the possibility of trying some medication with my psychiatrist (I do have a psychiatrist, I'm not naive, I am fully aware that this is insane and my health insurance is in line with all my other spectacular benefits, if there's treatment available in Europe, I can have it) but then I got pregnant and I wasn't feeling *that* bad so we decided against it. Now I am still breastfeeding but I could also stop, the boob sucker is over 2.
