Some people just can't turn off their brains and play drone for dozens of hours a week for decades. It feels existentially, aesthetically, and sometimes ethically crushing to spend a whole life doing work you can't expect yourself to respect or value, no matter how much you get paid or how little the work overtly demands of you.

Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory.

This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.