Soul-destroying

War is a soul-destroying experience for soldiers: you're never the same easy-going person after you've killed.

The daily rat race is soul-destroying: you soon give up all aspirations and just try to survive the boredom.

The results of such excessive concentration and production are, sooner or later, huge, soul-destroying Trusts, immense national rivalries, and appalling bloody wars largely occasioned by the existence and ever-growing needs of such insatiable machines.

A spate of graffiti attacks on West Midlands Railway trains has prompted the operator to warn vandals that they are posing a risk to public health. [...] "At a time when our cleaning teams are working extremely hard in challenging conditions, it is soul-destroying for them to face this pointless additional workload just to get carriages back on the tracks.

Generative AI won’t be the end of employment, we are told, only “boring work” – with chatbots helpfully doing all the soul-destroying, repetitive tasks and humans merely supervising them.

The Harry Potter star, who has not acted in a film since 2018, says she found promotion duties ‘soul-destroying’ but is now ‘maybe the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been’