Progress, the way you think about it, is defined externally. It's drilled into us that we have to get good grades, get into a good school, get the best job, keep working and moving up, up, up.

Even if you do those things perfectly it probably won't make you happy because you're letting someone else define what success and progress is for you. And there will always be more to achieve and a higher level to climb.

If the progress treadmill is meaningful to you, power to you. Otherwise, you have to find your own meaning. When you do your pointless job won't seem so pointless.

I make a good salary at a large software company and I have an amazing family and friends. Every day I feel like I'm growing as a human being in my relationships. My job pays the bills and my family is comfortable. We drive old cars and live fairly frugally. I'm much happier now than I ever was when I was trying to make progress according to someone else's rules.

Also, if your job is boring, do the hell out of that job. One of the happiest people I've ever met served pizza and did it better than anyone I'd ever seen; she remembered every customer's name, made all the kids laugh, and had a good thing to say to everyone she met.

There's a lot of satisfaction to be had from taking something that doesn't matter and making it matter.

I was very depressed at my job for similar reasons (albeit in research rather than as a developer), and I definitely had trouble making progress. One thing that really helped for me was exploring what other people in other research groups were working on. I ended up discovering that other people in my lab were doing awesome things with machine learning (which I had no experience with but found to be really cool).

I decided to put in the bare minimum effort doing the grunt work I was assigned to do normally, and used my free time at work and at home to study machine learning / data science and to speak with the other research team to develop a background in their project. The topic switch and sense of purpose changed my outlook on the job entirely, and after demonstrating that I could add value to their project, this other research group was able to convince my boss to transfer me to their project which has been awesome and led to many cool opportunities.

I would encourage you to explore what other people at your job are working on. Maybe you can move laterally into a role which you find to be more interesting, or at least discover an opportunity to build interesting skills.

Definitely. And you need to be careful - you can definitely be too casual and make a mistake that might come up in review (as I did not too long ago).

But the other side of this is that, by not emotionally investing in the work, you don't also end up feeling hurt and betrayed should you not get the promotion you think you 'deserve'. When I built some beautiful application, but got passed over, it felt like my manager had stabbed me in the back. That's unhealthy.

Also, I think that once you internalise the idea that the job was just a job you can become a better performer. You wont feel listless and pointless when a client makes your life difficult, or you are switched from one project to the another. I find that now I just shrug, and tackle what's next.