A few years ago, back when I still gave a damn (and probably during my most productive quarter in my entire professional career), somebody complained that my language was too curt on Slack, and I was a denied a 20k performance bonus as a result. It was pretty easy to not care after that.
More and more lulls with more and more years of experience. I hit the gym more, socialize more, cook more extravagantly, take walks more often etc. The most important thing was to train myself to not give a damn when people were making stupid decisions at work that were going to bite them N months down the line during those lulls.
I actually stayed there (I’m still there); just finished taking my 2 month paid sabbatical, I now have an 8 hour time zone difference with most engineers so I get to work on my own without distractions, and I have a strong policy of not developing anything bespoke and only plugging together off-the-shelf components (I specialize in Platform and Infrastructure).
With the mindset shift, it’s actually a pretty relaxing job. I make $180k, which isn’t the best salary, but also far from the worst, and I have both an abundance of time and very little oversight (amplified with the timezone difference now that I’m in the US) which means that I can use that salary to pursue things that I am interested in, spend time with my family etc.
I definitely thought about quitting at the time, but visa restrictions (I had just arrived in the US on an L1-B visa which is non-transferable) meant that I couldn’t. Now I’m a permanent resident, so I could leave if I wanted to, but I think that “quiet quitting” is still the right choice for where I’m at in my life.