I'm only 2 years younger than you, and in a similar boat. It's a shame that we're in an economic period where you and I can both be employed full-time and still not be able to afford the cost of living. I have a 5-star resume and plenty of field experience, I avoided marriage, kids, and drugs in my 20's so that those are not factors holding me back, and I even have a few years worth of management experience and lower-level machinist experience. I'm pretty much borderline an operations consultant, I even worked directly with a CFO for a few years when I was a manager, so I can do probably just up under the bar of it all, I just don't have the legal degree and paper work in the U.S. required to be able to do those kinds of jobs. I had to drop out of college when I was younger due to personal issues with my family.
You are not a failure. You should be proud to have a full time job, even if it's one that you hate, because of how scarce jobs can be. At the same time though, all it takes is the wrong type of manager (the corrupt, messed up, power hungry kind) in order to totally make an otherwise enjoyable job into a shitty job. If that's the problem with working, you should possibly look at trying to pick up 2 part-time jobs. You'd need a day job and a night job though, because quite often part-timers don't want to play ball with each other's schedules and seem to worship the midshift as a "Please don't sue us for not paying for your health insurance" safe-zone. There are ways to make yourself handle work-related stress better in a positive way that may even improve your work performance, but if the problem is a clash with management, particularly with an abusive manager, I'd sooner look at finding a few more jobs. The trouble is, you've got to drop applications like mad these days just to get even a few interviews lined up. But you WANT to do that, because you want to keep the options open for yourself. It's a good practice to have applications floating about even when you're comfortable at your job and pay grade, just for the sake of having the option to jump ship should you feel the need to one day.