To add to the sibling comments, and with the risk of sounding cheesy - at least prisoners
are aware that they are unfree: they are physically confined against their will by a well-defined entity for a clearly stated reason and duration. That doesn't help much with their mental degradation, except maybe making it less unexpected (although people are still surprised by the idea that prison just hardens criminals so idk.)
Outside of a penal institution, your freedom is limited by a multitude of varying affordances: behavioral nudges, implicit value judgements, unstated social conventions, and so on, which automatically limit your behavioral options. Many of these pressures contradict each other, and handling the cognitive dissonance every waking moment can slowly add up to decision fatigue.
So it is very easy to end up chasing whatever you sincerely believe to be "success", yet do it unnaturally and in spite of yourself. To compare with the prison example: it's very easy to get stuck in a situation where there is no obvious "enemy" who's keeping your stuck, and no obvious reason things are like this besides "they randomly ended up like this". And you can keep doing this for longer than the whatever the average prison term is, because you don't realize your idea of "success" is not really yours at all, it's a label you put on an unstable compromise with the totality of your being.
This is your brain on misaligned incentives. If you've ended up in such a situation, you're also probably in an environment that censures the kind of thinking required to realign them, and which offers no support with the work involved in getting out of the trap. So it's also very easy to start feeling like there's something wrong with you in particular, and slip into more chronic forms of burnout, depression, and more or less permanent mental dysfunction.
It's especially bad when a society runs on unresolved internal contradictions for a few generations - everyone's burnout adds up to a form of pervasive malaise, and the reactions can be quite brutal and senseless. Germany in the 1930s Germany or Russia in the 1990s Russia come to mind - historical periods whose horrors are usually downplayed in favor of romanticizing the struggle for survival in a society which offers no hope for a good life.
It can be draining. IMHO that's one reason why religions, ideologies, conspiracy theories, pyramid schemes, and other arbitrary value systems (including the monetary one!) manage to motivate people so well, regardless of having no ultimate basis in physical reality. They offer you a chance to extinguish all your self-doubts and replacing innumerable fickle sensors with a single value scale, so instead of suffering impostor syndrome and burnout, you end up happily believing that you're always right, and blind to any actual harm you might be causing.
So if you're currently having your brain fried by the world, remember that it's not your fault, and please do whatever it takes to resist and get yourself back to the clarity of a healthy mental state - even if that means letting go more preconceptions than you're comfortable with.