Ask HN: I am Software Engineer 30yo and I feel purposeless
Lately I am not feeling well, I don’t care about anything, I feel like I do nothing. Doing simple chores has become difficult. I've been trying to get a haircut for the last 2 weeks and I am unable to go to the barber shop. I don’t feel like cleaning anything, I don’t feel like doing groceries, I’ve even started to get dirty while eating, it’s embarrassing, but I think it is because I am not paying attention to anything, I am constantly drifting away somewhere, I feel disappointed about life. Even in my worst moments I honestly question myself if it is even worth it to live, don't get me wrong I don't want to stop living and I do love my wife and family, but is more like I feel like there will not be much difference between me existing or not, and I do not know why I feel like that, that same thing would probably apply for anybody in the planet, but I cannot stop that feeling/thought.

I think that a big part of the issue is work, I have wrong expectations about work in life. I've always looked for purpose in work, and it has been like that for the first few years of my career. I used to honestly look forward to Mondays to wake up and go to the office. I was unable to get sleep on Sundays because of how excited I was about the work I was going to do the next morning. And I guess that it can be like that for the first years of a career, but now work is boring, repetitive and meaningless. I feel like working is fake, like if nothing matters, I am tired of the corporate business, how fake it is, unproductive, bureaucratic, unfair, contemptuous and all for nothing, just for the sake of hiring more people, make the organization tree structure grow so managers and directors can have more people reporting to them and increase their salaries, without never actually resolving actual problems or making the service any better.
And I feel bad for feeling like this, because I am seen as privileged by my family and friends because of the salary I earn and because I've been able to leave my country, which is economically badly positioned.

I guess this is the crisis of 30s, the point where most people decide to “fix it” and get purpose in life by having children (maybe it works?), but that doesn’t help me, it doesn't help me to go through this, to resolve this situation that I am facing.
I don’t want to just accept it and get delusional and to be one more sad gear of the corporate clock. I don’t want that because I am bored of my career. It affects my relationship with the people I love and with myself. And I would feel like a failure for having everything I could have ever asked in life for but not being able to be happy.

I don’t know if I should push harder and start my own business to try to get purpose from that (which I know sounds wrong and like hitting my head against a wall), or to surrender and focus on other aspects of life and just be a mediocre developer, because I don’t feel like trying much harder in a regular job (which sounds even sadder, I think I would prefer hitting my head against a wall). This feeling changes from week to week, maybe next week I will try hard to be interested and passionate in the task I am working on and the next week I will go back to not caring about it.

Have you ever felt like this?