Stop caring. Stop giving a fuck.
Sooner or later, most people at BigCorp™ end up here. I have talked to many engineers and managers who arrived at this conclusion either independently or guided by friends, colleagues, and mentors.
Your work had solid business impact, but you didn’t involve enough people? Not getting performance evaluations that meet your expectations? No raises or promotions? Stop caring. Just change jobs every couple of years like a normal person.
You see obvious quality-of-life improvements that would make the product nicer to use? Well, the implementation would be quick, but the direct business impact would be low, and you will end up doing all the work of convincing stakeholders, implementing, and running A/B tests, and none of it will matter for the evaluation. So, stop caring.
Working on a project that gets deprioritized cause the leadership said so? That’s just corporate life. Stop caring. Find things outside of work to care about. Care about your family. Train for a marathon.
Some bullshit bureaucratic process/training/policy you have to go through every week, month, or quarter? Do it just well enough to comply and move on. Stop caring about improving it; that only brings misery, more work, and no rewards.
Not caring does seem like the rational choice, given we don’t control most of what happens at work and the reward for caring is usually just more work and more stress. I also 100% agree with caring about things outside of work, be it family, hobbies, or giving back to the community.
But the problem is that not caring makes me miserable. Caring about things is what makes me ME. Settling and being okay with not caring about things I spend a third of my life on is appalling to me. I don’t want to turn into a person who doesn’t care. I want to care very much about things I do. I want to give a fuck. In fact, I want to give a lot of fucks!
The only solution I see is doing something I care a lot about and where that caring is an advantage, not a liability. Caring by itself isn’t enough. I need agency to turn that care into action, and I need the outcomes of those actions to align with how I’m rewarded. That’s what makes caring feel satisfying to me.
“Stop caring” seems like the wrong treatment for the right diagnosis. If you start to feel the need to stop caring, then instead of changing your character and values, I’d argue that you should treat it as a strong signal to change your environment and do something where you can capture the value of your competence.
Of course, most of us can’t just change what we do overnight. We have to think about family, mortgages, responsibilities, the job market, and so on. The point I’m trying to make is that getting to a place in life where you deeply care about what you do, and where that care is an advantage and feels satisfying, might be the meaning you’ve been looking for. How to get to such a place is something I’ve yet to figure out for myself. What I have figured out is that not caring is NOT the solution for me.