I don't want to live like this. It's miserable, but not as miserable as putting in effort to change a dysfunctional organization that doesn't want to change.

Consider this example: I once worked for a contracting agency and we were on a project that was going really poorly and so I put in some effort to improve things and try to make it better. Things were not improving, people were angry with me. Eventually I learned that the person I was working for wanted me to fail, because he wanted to use a different contracting agency, so he wanted me to fail and look bad to give him an excuse to switch to a different contracting agency. But, then people even higher in the organizations were friends with my contracting agency and so I stayed on the contract and kept doing an honest but minimal amount of work. My boss literally wanted the project to fail.

It's fairly common for organizations to become this screwed up, and yes, it sucks to work for them, but it sucks even more to burn yourself out trying to change them when they don't want to change.

What were the clues, in hindsight?

I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.

Conservation of energy is highly selected for biologically.