> I was driven to actively contemplate suicide due to my boss and his shitty attitudes and issues but no one actually seemed to care. Even then I convinced myse

> I was driven to actively contemplate suicide due to my boss and his shitty attitudes and issues but no one actually seemed to care. Even then I convinced myself with "aww, it's not so bad" when in reality it was absolutely horrific. But what specifically was bad (project? the company's product/service? customers? market? internal stuff? development process? middle managers? team?), and was it only like this for you, or your coworkers? It's impossible to get an inkling from reading this. (Equivalently, if you could have changed three things about the company/dept, what would they have been?) > I am however still resentful over the lost years. I really don't see framing things like that is helpful. You chose to stay out of (extreme) fear; you could have left. Again, what did you learn about what you most wanted as changes in the company, or about yourself or your psychology? Unless you can articulate (/reframe) something positive, I don't see there's much other people or you yourself can extract from this account. (For example: when you see management hierarchies of bullies, incompetent, cronies and no accountability, you learn the signs to look for so you can detect them the next time, at interview or even before. What are those signs?) A superb book is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" (1946/1959). TLDR: no experience is inherently negative or positive, you can always reframe it to extract something positive. This determines your outlook. People here cite it often: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=+%22Man%27s+Search+for+Meaning%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=+%22Man%27s+Search+for+Meaning%22