Feeling burned out is completely normal after college. In my experience, it's hard to work at an endeavor for more than about 3 years without burning out. As you move out into the world, you'll find find that time and energy management can be more important than the work. Because work just sort of happens when we create the right conditions, so emphasizing it too much tends to lead to failure anyway.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I feel that we are entering an era of great struggle. The social contract has been eroded to the point that it's crumbling. Not for any scientific reason, but because dark forces have coopted the goals of technology. Where once the internet was going to bring free access to information for humanity, now it's used to propagandize and subvert the population for the ego-based goals of a handful of wealthy and powerful men whose greed can never be satisfied. AI will mostly accelerate the decline.

What that means is, the promise of a better life which you sacrificed long years for is no longer guaranteed, if it ever was. Where once you could apply at a handful of agencies or institutions with a high likelihood of being hired, now you're up against potentially hundreds of similarly qualified candidates who get weeded out by algorithms. Nobody takes the broad view to see that most of them are overqualified, or to ask why we're doing it this way, or what gives certain people the right to decide and not others - why only they have the money.

I went through a similar situation when I graduated with my ECE degree in 1999 right into the Dot Bomb. I tasted a year of progress before the powers that be started taking it all away. The arrival of the iPhone and Facebook around 2007 replacing Waterfall with Agile, the funneling of R&D funds into outsourcing and the Housing Bubble popping in 2008, the racist backlash to Obama from 2009-2016 that led to the Citizens United case and billionaires buying elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, just on and on and on. I can't remember a good year in all of that, only melancholy, bittersweet. Maybe 2013 after the election when there was enough confidence for electric cars to get a foothold and music was getting good again like it was in the 90s hah.

Nobody told me that the average wage isn't an average. Rather than saying "the typical graduate earns $85,000 at this job", they should say "a dedicated worker can earn up to $85,000 with a little luck". Because nobody is fully employed, usually. A few good years get wiped out with a few months of unemployment. A stable job ends when the company goes out of business. The industry you're trained for gets disrupted with no replacement.

This will all hit the fan around 2030 when AI surpasses humans at all labor. We thought it was 2040 or 2050, but it's on our doorstep because unsupervised machine learning grows exponentially. Nobody has a clue what will happen next after the Singularity.

So I guess my best advice is that the cognitive dissonance you're feeling is very real, and I know it can be hard to endure. But it's also a warning from your subconscious. If you can't see any way through the challenge to the success, then it might be time to step back and take a bird's-eye view of the situation. I highly recommend meditation.

Another way of looking at it is from a holistic perspective. Your challenge isn't unique, meaning that others are facing it too. I can't say enough good things about finding like-minded peers. Together you can overcome adversity that can't be met alone. In fact, that may be the shift needed to take us into the New Age and UBI and an economy that actually works, meaning that the cost of living gets lower each year instead of higher. Maybe what you thought was the thing was the thing that gets us to the thing.

I'm finally finding meaning working at a startup like I thought I'd be in 2000 after a long odyssey. Or I should say, it found me when they saw my comments on a local tech Slack. What changed is my mindset, from ego to service. Where once I was looking for an angle, a hack that would let me get from point A to point B faster, now I seek peace. I stopped chasing money for survival and surrendered to heeding a calling, and letting creation handle the details that foster my existence. After enduring so much negative reinforcement, I've found that the answers can be easier than we ever expected, and that they're often right in front of us.