Hello everyone,
I (29M) studied aerospace engineering, my last job was at a major airline, and before that I worked at a few other large companies. By any reasonable measure, things have gone well. Stable jobs, respectable positions, no obvious failures.
But I’ve walked away more than once. Not because something blew up there was no conflict, no breakdown, no story I can point to. Just a quiet internal disconnection, and then I’m gone.
What I keep noticing is that the bigger and more “prestigious” the environment, the faster this happens. These places function well. People are competent, professional, things get done. And somehow that’s exactly the problem. Everything runs so smoothly that it starts to feel like a performance one I can participate in without ever actually being in it.
I know my lines, I hit my marks, I don’t cause friction. But there’s no part of me that believes any of it matters.
What makes it hard to talk about is that this isn’t depression in the classic sense, and it’s not burnout from being overworked. It’s more like the opposite of burnout a kind of over-clarity. Once you understand how a system works, once you can see the scaffolding, it becomes difficult to feel anything but detached from it. The map replaces the territory.
The honest pattern seems to be this: I can perform competence indefinitely, but I can’t manufacture investment. And at some point the gap between those two things becomes unbearable, not dramatically, just quietly. Withdrawal stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like the only non-dishonest option.
I’m genuinely uncertain whether this is avoidance dressed up in philosophical clothing, or something more like a real incompatibility with conventional structures. Probably some of both.
Has anyone else hit this wall where nothing is objectively wrong, but you still can’t make yourself stay?