It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP.
Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.
I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it.
At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do.
The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version.
When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place."
Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
This is a really common failure pattern of people with a history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g. grades at school).
Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros to some relevant concepts (though each has problems, particularly Rao's book).
Once you have a framework of understanding incentives, cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much harder)
I got the same feeling from Gervais Principle. There's some lessons to learn here, however you also need to make sure you bring a lot of salt to the table.
That being said… yes cobra is usually insanely expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever “all you can eat low deductible” health plan your employer was offering.
The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep jobs...just to have health.
But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be fixed.
If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof, this problems go away.
There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"
There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA.
That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health.
I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area).
My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination.
It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.
I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.
But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again.
> Managers don't care.
This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.