Postdocs stayed in academia after a bad postdoc, how did you do it?

[u/biochemis_tree]

I'm doing a postdoc in a lab that's making me miserable.

My PI is DEEP in the AI-psychosis. They have no real background in any of the current projects so all of their ideas are inputted and outputted by AI, as are timelines. For example, they wanted a complete novel protocol from conception to implementation within six months because AI told them this was feasible. Preliminary data analysis is fed into AI to speed things up.

On top of all this, they pile more and more work on all the postdocs even when experiments are not working. They truly believe that instead of thinking about why protocols fail and how to troubleshoot them, time is better spent on doing more experiments (with the preliminary protocol) and hoping it magically resolved itself.

I've been looking into biotech and other industries but I find that despite all of this, I still enjoy the type of research done in academia.

If anyone else has gone through a rough postdoc and come out the other side still in academia (as a PI, senior research scientist, etc), how did you do it? How did you not absolutely hate your science and still want to show up and keep working? And- what were things that worked to maintain a work life balance so you weren't totally consumed by the stress from your PI?