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Feels like you read my mind. I'm disconnected from career and generally feel disappointed with direction of technology. It's quite difficult finding meaning in life surrounded by careerist.

> I started my career during the dot com boom, and there was so much optimism about the beneficial societal changes that tech and the Internet would bring. I don't feel like all tech is "evil" these days... Wow that's so true... we totally didn't see the social media dystopia we're living in today coming. We imagined a world where everyone has all the world knowledge available at their fingertips would be wonderful. How wrong were we.

I strongly relate, and think a big part it for me is that most people range from apathetic to hostile to most projects that try to wrest any power from tech companies, despite complaining about the way they've been immiserated by them in the next breath. It's hard enough trying to pry even little bits of freedom or individuality from the grasp of all these moneyed interests without every effort to do something like it getting a bunch of random hate

Thank you both - I'm feeling the same, and I had tied up so much of my personality and life with software development, I feel pretty lost now. I've had a side project to work on for as long as I can remember, now I'm just not interested in building at all. And honestly, I don't know where to go from here.

One question I’ve set out to answer is: what would I do if I were fired tomorrow? Understood that not everyone is in the position to switch to lower paying careers, start over, etc - but if you have some leash, what WOULD you do if you were fired tomorrow? (And I don’t mean short term like take a vacation then find another tech job - mean longer term like what kind of job will you be looking for next, or business to start, etc) Curious to hear your thoughts and anyone else who cares to share

I resonate with this -- I've noticed a pattern of big tech companies using their power (and prowess) to regulate in the tech space more, limit what users can do, advertise more, force dark patterns on their customers, and make puzzling decisions that rob the excitement they used to bring to the table of the past. They still make great new / updated products in a few areas, but it also seems like they take just as much as they give, these days. Whether it's changes to pricing models (Amazon Prime Video ad-free extra charges), or Google's notorious penchant for killing their own products (or features), or Microsoft's continuous push to get Edge in front of Windows users at almost any cost. Or Apple only offering their high-end MacBooks with Touch Bars, rather than physical function keys before they finally fixed everything with the M1 series almost 4 years later -- 4 years of Touch Bar hel…

My outlook is: if you work in big tech today, whatever you're working on, in its final culmination, is just a means to clutter the internet with ads.

>I don't feel like all tech is "evil" these days, but I do feel that the world would be better off if all the big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) just completely stopped building any new tech. Obviously that's not realistic, but it highlights my feeling that I'm not looking forward to any new tech from these companies, because more tech is going to invariably lead to more isolation, more "doom scrolling", more assaults on our attention. I feel like most big tech companies have just become the equivalent of drug dealers, just trying to hijack our brain's evolutionary attention mechanisms to addict us. "Attention is all you need" is right... "Attention is all you need" among above paragraph really hits hard and it's true. I think I feel the same way like all big tech companies should just be stopped from bringing new tech. Indeed, I have just started hating tech now a d…