I'm consuming nearly 50% more since getting a high-paying, stressful job.

Just a (long) vent; if anyone can relate, or has stories about how they remedied this in their life, please feel free to comment.

At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful, privileged jerk...

I work in IT (support/infrastructure side) for a niche branch of municipal government. Been there 8 yrs. I believe in the value we provide to the community and have historically found the work mentally stimulating but not chronically stressful. I truly loved working in my helpdesk roles in the earlier days, but living in ultra-HCOL Vancouver, Canada, needed more money if I was every going to retire.

Without much thought or effort on my part, I climbed the ranks up to my current position where I manage the IT dept. I started in Jan 2025 and got a large raise.

The emotional overhead of this job is INSANE. I only work 40hrs a week on paper, but I spend at least another 10hrs attempting to ward off issues caused by the critical lack of personal emotional maturity as well as processes/policies among the leadership team of which I am a part. I also spend a lot of time catatonically sitting in my car/lying on my couch watching BS media, basically in a prolonged functional freeze state.

I am in counseling (both professional and personal), I sleep/eat well enough, I have a great community (who I don't see much of since the job started), and I have enough money to have a nearly 40% savings rate while still having a comfortable life, which is beyond ridiculous.

But do I save 40%? Not even close. I just finished "auditing" my 2025 financial year, and if it weren't for the fact that I was too exhausted to spend more, I likely would have spent nearly all of my take-home pay on outsourcing basic life tasks and emotional purchasing.

For example...

In 2025, I got most of my meals prepped and delivered; they're not great and they're super expensive, but I can't fathom having the energy to cook (my former career was a chef!). I paid someone to clean my house and do a lot of my laundry for the same reason. I got my groceries delivered. I almost bought a car online and had it delivered, but mercifully got the energy to go to the dealership and negotiate. Amazon purchases of crap I don't need, liquor...I fell back into vaping to the tune of $100/mo...restaurants, fast food, large impulse purchases of camping and cooking equipment I don't even have the energy to use...the list is endless.

As I sat there with my spreadsheet, I felt surprise, then disgust, then landed on grief. The "opportunity cost" of this job is not just excessive consumption, it's disconnection from my life. While I'm incredibly grateful that I'm able to pay to make my life "easier" and more "fun," I feel like I'm basically a tourist in my own life, flying in from work every now and again to crash out on the bed, watch some cheap entertainment, and pick up some buy some souvenirs, then go back.

Years ago, I did the Kon Mari thing. When I started, as I held each of my ridiculous amount of possessions in my hands, I realized I couldn't even identify what "joy" felt like. The fear of having to give away everything I owned pushed me to learn to identify joy in a spoon, a guitar, a hat, a pair of socks, a bag of lentils. In the end, I ended up with a finely curated, small collection of possessions, each one of which brought me joy. Fast forward to now...not the case. The (many more) things I now own, clearly own me.

I knew this was a problem, but I think doing the 2025 audit really snapped me awake. While I'm not ready to make sweeping changes to my career to gain back time, I used my surge of grief-driven energy to cancel my meal and grocery delivery, cancel my house cleaning, return a bunch of late-year Amazon purchases, inventory my stuffed pantry, fridge, and freezer, check out the games and movies I had in the house, and, critically, set up a budget for 2026 that dials things way back but is still realistic about my "stress-based spending" situation.

Longer-term, I really need to sit down and think about what I'm sacrificing and how much I'm consuming for the sake of making more money. Clearly, the numbers don't add up, and neither do the ethics, for me.