I am the in the same situation as you. This has been what I've identified is the main thing that ruins my life. Every day it takes me about 30 minutes for me to

I am the in the same situation as you. This has been what I've identified is the main thing that ruins my life. Every day it takes me about 30 minutes for me to convince myself to get out of the bed and continue doing senseless grind with no end in sight. I have zero autonomy over what I do, because I joined a extreme programming shop where I'm supposed to pair 8 hours a day. Do you know how hard it is to program all day without listening to music because you have to "communicate" all the time? The only thing I've been able to device to reduce this sense of dread and lack of autonomy is to focus on developing my own tools to work. But now, I can't even do that because some dolt complained that me using non-standard tools made him "confused" during our pair-programming sessions. The standard advice for this situation is to get another job. But I know, that will not fix the main issue. The previous job I had, was a legacy tech debt nightmare, we were understaffed and management didn't want to address any of the issues while expecting us to do over-time support. The job before that, had beautiful code but the code-reviews were insanely political and if the reviewer didn't like you, you would get 400 comments on a PR. This industry has managed to take a beautiful thing like developing software and turn it into a nightmare. JUST LET ME CODE IN PEACE YOU IDIOTS! As for solutions, the one that seems more rational to me is the "freelancing part time while working on my own product(s)". That's the one I'm betting my life on. Wish me luck.