Its strange. The biggest lesson I learned was almost the opposite: I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me. It has more to do with who you are when there is nobody else around. Other people often act as a sort of fun house mirror that distort and reflect back a false image.
Learning to be happy alone and seeing through the pleasant lies is absolutely vital to becoming an adult.
We also ultimately derive pretty much everything we most value in life from our interactions with other lives, which is why I think it's so important to develop high-trust relationships with at least one or two other people so we can continue to grapple with the fact that we all have different perspectives, weaknesses and strengths and can usually learn more and get significantly more things done when we cooperate than when we're running solo. Which requires trust.
YMMV, of course. Some people can go build a cabin in the woods and live off the land and spend all their free time meditating and be perfectly happy. But that's not most of us. And even those people eventually get too old to keep taking care of themselves.
Management claims to want to understand and fix the problem, and their "fixes" reveal the real problems. Fix 1 - schedule a lot of group meetings for twice a week. After week 1, management drops off and fails to show up anymore for most of them. The meetings go off track. The answer? More meetings!
We now have that meeting daily. And have even less attendance.
Fix 2 - we don't know what people are doing, let's create dashboards. A slapdash, highly incorrect and problematic dashboard is created. It doesn't matter, because none of the managers ever checks the dashboard. The big boss hears we are still behind, and commandeers a random product person to be his admin assistant and has her maintain several spreadsheets in semi-secret tracking everyone's progress.
This semi-secret spreadsheet becomes non-secret and people find a million and one problems with it (not surprising as the commandeered admin assistant nee product person was pulling the data from all sorts of random areas with little direction with little coordination with others). We then have the spreadsheet war of various managers having their own spreadsheets.
Fix 3 - we are going to have The Source of Truth for product intake and ongoing development, with a number of characteristics (and these are generally not terrible characteristics). These are handed off to a couple of junior people with no experience to implemented with zero feedback. The net result is we still don't have a Source of Truth, but more of an xkcd situation that now we have 4 or 5 sources of truth strung together with scripts, duct tape, bandaids and prayer.
This continues on and on over years. Ideas are put forth, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but none of them matter because the leaders lack the ability to followup or demonstrate even basic understanding of what our group actually does.
It is truly soul crushing, but in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?
Peak absurdity, yet you and I have both seen it happen first hand. I wonder how common it is, because it's as ugly as it is mystifying.
When management isn't properly engaged, they need to delegate to someone who is. If neither things happen, it's just chaos and angry, ignorant apes making a lot of noise.
> in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?
I am currently unemployed with a rapidly shrinking cushion, and I'm honestly on the fence as to whether putting up with the above would be better. If there is no hope for improvement, all you're doing is exchanging your mental health for a few more beans.