You're bored. If you still have 10, 20 or 30 years of work ahead of you, coasting is not an option. What seems "easy" now is actually very dangerous. Rather than growing in your career, you will stagnate. You won't get the promotions and raises you want, and you won't acquire the skills to keep professionally growing.
That will make you incredibly vulnerable. An unmotivated and lazy worker is the easiest to let go. And if you're forced out of a job where you have underachieved, it's going to be that much harder to impress future employers.
Stress is your middle name. Yes, every job comes with stress, but it's up to you to measure what your work takes out of you. If you feel incredible pressure throughout your time at the office, take your work home with you, and then can't sleep because you're wound up so tightly, you need to rethink what you're doing to yourself.
I'm all for working hard, and meeting project deadlines will always require extending yourself from time to time, but if you're constantly in work mode, you're selling yourself short. Where's your life?
You're underappreciated (and overworked). You deserve respect. If you have a boss who doesn't value your work, or your company doesn't treat its employees well, it's probably time to move on. Of course, it always makes sense to try to turn around a bad situation. Talk to your boss about how you can better work together, or look for other opportunities in the company. But please don't play martyr and suffer through a work atmosphere that makes you feel "less than."
You keep saying, "If I could do it all over, I would be a . . ."
