That's not what I'm talking about. Your working life is where you act on the world outside of yourself.

If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.

Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit

At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible.

If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.

Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.

I agree, and I still don’t have an answer for this dilemma. I don’t know if I’m the problem, or if it is the structure of our society.. In the meantime the only thing that I know is that I have to choose between not caring and feeling like I’m wasting most of my day, and caring with the potential abuse of an employer