After working in IT consulting, I second that. I often found myself wondering how most of what I did was a waste of my skills. I had learned a lot of cool stuff in college, like distributed systems, that was completely useless to what I did. The problem was, when I transitioned to management, all my proactivity and passion for strategy were also almost useless; you were expected to do as everyone else, or else. So I quit :)

Right now, working on my startup, I get ticked off for a lot of menial work that it involves, but despite being tired and broke, I'm way happier. And this simply because I'm using my skills to work on meaningful stuff.

The chinese have an interesting saying: "All you need to be happy is something to do, someone to love and something to hope for". I think this clearly states the need for balance.