This post resonated with me, as it seems to have done with many of us. My way out of the prison was giving up on "cattle not pets" - I had to acknowledge that I will never, ever need the ability to spin up or spin down a herd of containers or automatically configure a thousand of anything or whatever is understood by the "cattle" archetype. I've got the handful of services that I care about, running based on manual configurations, which I don't even bother to back up - and the hobby has remained fun!