High five brother! If I do some substitutions/minor updates in your post I could have written it. We were taken over by a huge Italian company, instead of 500 I have some 80.000 colleagues now. The once nice to work for company has turned into a "body shop". I have actually four! "Muppets" and none of them really knows what I'm doing. They don't seem to care too. Sure every now and then they jell jump and I ask how high, put out a fire somewhere and it’s business as usual.

I also got used to the money and have mortgage and other obligations. It will probably be difficult to make the same money elsewhere. Sure I could go back to my contractors job in the Netherlands and spend 3,5 hours per day in the traffic jam to work on some boring finance job in Amsterdam...

My workaround is try to stress the positive things and make use of them as much as possible. For me that means: I get to work in Spain, learn the language/culture/food:-) It's a 5 minutes drive to work, this gives me lots of extra free time to do fun stuff. I can work on my personal development during working hours, this helps me to keep in shape work wise like learning new technologies or refreshing old ones. Hell I am allowed to spend some 20% of my time on "research". From time to time people are actually quite happy with what I do and thank me for solving their little problem. etc. etc.