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> 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.

In the early 90s the internet was great. The problems started with companies and their inherent greed.

No, it was the people. Early internet users demographics was a result of extreme selection. Companies did exist back then.

Companies existed of course, but they provided the building blocks of the internet and were not directly concerned with the processing of our data.

This is true. The big turning point was the release of the iPhone, a device that allowed people who didn't know what a computer was to access the internet.

I'd also call out Eternal September in 1993, when AOL made it easy for anyone with a computer to connect online. This permanently changed the composition of the internet, and paved the way for the social networks that would later come to dominance after the iPhone was released.

Why iphone? We had internet on mobile phones before that point.

But I agree with idea that internet became dumber with more people in.

> Why iphone? We had internet on mobile phones before that point.

Certainly not in any way that mattered, and I say this as someone who spent the middle part of my career specifically on mobile.

I mean, sure, there was stuff like WAP, and some other niche phones that could (very, very clunkily) display full HTML. But the launch of the iPhone is what first brought the mobile Internet to the masses (and pretty much all smartphones after the iPhone aped the basic design), and most importantly, was the beginning of the change where websites started even giving a shit about mobile clients ("Mobile first" design and all that).

I think mostly just the iPhone exploded it, and also made a lot of things much more low effort. Like take for example people constantly posting photos of themselves and food and what have you on social media - pre iPhone high quality photos required a separate camera and a computer in order to upload onto social media. Post iPhone you could do it all from one device.

Barriers to entry that revolve around level of interest are ok.

On average, yes it's easy to get stuck in a rut with low quality content, toxic social media, attention-stealing recommendations, etc. but with just a reasonable amount of effort it can be avoided in favor of the good stuff. Just like a traveler can get stuck at tourist traps or with just a few more moments of planning find a local treasure; and how if you're at a buffet you could get locked into the mac & cheese or go find the hibachi station in the back. It would be nice if getting lost wasn't a thing, but it's not terribly onerous to navigate the scenic route.

But we are surrounded by people not doing that, and not even through any fault of their own for the most part. They are wired into an endless machine that trades dopamine hits for their money. Children are wired in before they even have a chance to resist.

The Extremely Online crowd’s influence is waning.

Twitter is widely mocked as a cesspool of conversation. Facebook is seen as antiquated. Instagram and TikTok are the current darlings but they seem to have less of an iron grip than the OG social networks.

The future is probably not another winner-take-all network. We’ve tried enough of those. The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them based on affiliations, much like web forums.

You mean Discord (interest, hobbies) and family chat channels on various platforms?

Weird, I've seen social media and "online communities" move into the publicly accepted sphere more and more. 10 years ago you'd be looked at funny by certain people if you said you had a social media or reddit account, and nowadays it's just sorta expected

This is just a side note, but my Instagram feed has become basically entirely irrelevant. It's just reel after reel from people promoting themselves or some product. The network feels increasingly like a rapid-paced HSN/home shopping network or similar.

Do I look at it daily? Yes, I do. But I'd say that 95% of the content I see on it is junk, very few of my peers are posting their lives on there.

As for blue-line Facebook, it's so slow it's borderline unusable. I'm not sure what happened (ReactJS maybe?), but the performance is a fraction of what it was ten years ago.

> The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them based on affiliations, much like web forums.

Yeah it's like everyone got drunk on connection and is slowly rediscovering peace in disconnecting. I'd wager you're right about this.

Yep. My IG feed is very quiet after I muted all the self-promoters and overly-prolific posters. Plus, I only follow people I know IRL, so I hit the "you're caught up" marker within 20s or so easily. The result is it is very rare to load up IG and find something of interest. I can still stay connected, but it doesn't grab me. I feel like the reel section just doesn't work for me, either.

> very few of my peers are posting their lives on there

Yes, this is not a great sign for IG. It is still relevant in that people click the icon everyday, but it seems to be slipping.

I used to feel like I wanted to "Save Them From Themselves" but I no longer care. As long as I and my family are not zombies, I could care less that the rest of these people we're surrounded by are lobotomizing themselves. As long as they aren't in my way they can do what they want. They'll be voluntarily stepping into their own Matrix Pods in 20 years and I won't be.

I used to feel the way that you do, but in a social democracy "I don't care what those idiot zombies do" has it's limits, because everyone gets an equal vote.

Also, you say that "As long as I and my family are not zombies", but every single one of my friends and family with kids age 10 and up are genuinely pretty terrified about the potential impact of social media on their kids: "I feel so lucky I didn't have to deal with this when I was growing up" is a common refrain I hear. And yes, all these parents try to teach their kids about the pitfalls of social media, but they know they can't just can it, so it's a huge, largely negative influence that they feel limited power to fight against.

> How wrong were we

Nowhere! Social media brought out the true character of people; most (many?) of us are negative species, mix that along with bad people.

Ehh this type of thinking is reductive.

The primary issues are a combination of nature vs nurture. The age of argument, the solution has always been some combination of both.

But when you look at our western society over the past 60 years or so, you see that -fundamentally- the nurture part of the equation is being heavily influenced by capitalistic forces. For example, news used to be once a day, then 3 times a day, now 24/7/365. There isn't more news now than 100 years ago, so how do you feel all that time and how do you keep someone engaged? (If you have been paying attention, you know the answer is selling fear, sex, violence, and other negative emotions are traits of the human species.)

But really, the easiest way to counter this toxic mindset was said best by mister Rodgers: just look for the helpers. Look for the guys running into the fray when everyone else runs away... Those people are just as human as you or me... They are the true character of the human species. For we are a communal species that depends on one another, we always have, we aren't a bad species... We are just letting our man made systems bring out the worst.

>Look for the guys running into the fray when everyone else runs away... Those people are just as human as you or me... They are the true character of the human species.

If we have to look to find them, are they really the "true" character? I'm sure if we look hard enough we could find a polite polar bear, but is that a "true" polar bear?

main characters =/= dominant characters =/= true characters

> There isn't more news now than 100 years ago, so how do you feel all that time and how do you keep someone engaged?

So, I agree with your point, and I also agree that there isn't enough news to fill 24/7 coverage... but there is definitely more news, or at least more news that may be of interest to any given audience, than 100 years ago because we live in a more globally connected society where issues in another country can absolutely have direct impact on us because manufacturing/materials sourcing became something that now happens on a more global scale.

I think what we have really underestimated is the amount of people who would get hooked on instant gratification more than this available knowledge (which, turns out, I am also guilty of).

Then came for-profits that agressively monetised every single bad habit one might imagine online and got us where we are today. Knowledge is still at the fingertips, but so many of us are now short-attention-span information-holics and instant gratification addicts.

We imagined brave new world, but became an equivalent of chain smokers trying to break out of their habit in a world where everyone else also smokes.

I am far younger than you, but ditto on all counts. The pandemic crushed everything that I studied and worked for. And it taught me as someone in my early 20s that even though I spent my entire life with my nose to the grindstone, everything could be instantly stripped away by world governments, and friends and coworkers and family members could also suddenly turn on each other like rabid dogs.

Honestly, at least be grateful that you had some good years of excitement, it seems. I was young during the 2008 crash, but it affected my family. And now I have no motivation for anything. My peers are similar. Why build something only to have it crushed? A lot of us are just living in the moment. We also saw people with lifelong careers and families of their own have their lives destroyed by various governments in the USA and abroad.

> everything could be instantly stripped away by world governments

Your comment suggests that the driver of your (and your peers) anhedonia is some lingering threat of some future lockdown by governments? Is that what you're saying? And, is that actually the case or is it just the easiest cause to put your finger on?

I understand that period was really rough for so many reasons. But a lot of the angst I see among friends/family/coworkers today isn't from the lockdowns per se, but it's more from having to slow down and consider some heavy, almost-existential questions surrounding their relationships, life, fulfillment, social supports, and purpose. And, at least for me, struggling with how many of the things I thought I knew about myself turned out to not really be true. Lockdowns may have forced me to see and acknowledge these issues, but they were always there.

It's not angst, it's real.

Though I'm young, my work is international. I was separated from my girlfriend, apartment, coworkers, and entire livelihood in a different nation, at a position one could say I spent much of my life up to that point studying and working toward. My colleagues were separated from their families and children. Some lost their homes because they were let go from their jobs as a result. Some older friends of mine divorced because of this. Some lost their businesses that they spent their lives building. One of them committed suicide. This was a guy in his late 50s with two children and a wife, who had been forcibly separated from each other on opposite sides of the world for over a year.

Short of wars, there has never been such a brutal and absolute upheaval of population movements for civilian populations.

There are a lot of people my age who went through this type of experience, and that is one reason why I think the original poster sees more people with less joie de vivre. I am also saying it is lucky for people who just had lockdowns at home or had their lives confined to one locale or even country, or who at least had some years of "living" their lives before this happened. What I mean by that is people who at least had their 20s and maybe even 30s to build a career, life, and family, on top of their years of studying and schooling. But for those of us just getting our careers started, and for people who had international careers and lives split between countries, there were several years of nightmares along with the knowledge now that, at any moment, all this could instantly happen again.

Sure, anyone could get hit by a bus tomorrow. But it was people and governments turning on one another like wolves that was a sharp mask-off moment, especially for those of us in our formative years. That is a different type of crushing, and utterly stultifying, effect. Because it is not a random accident, but rather a cold and calculating opposition by others. All I know is that I spent my life sacrificing short-term rewards as I worked toward long-term payoffs, and as soon as I started to see results, everything went up in flames. Everything. If motivation is squelched for major life projects and milestones, I think it is clear how motivation is also squelched for personal projects or side projects. If you're older, and if your life wasn't split or shattered across the globe, be thankful is all I can say.

But for me and others in my age bracket and positions, there was this natural, sharp turn toward instant gratification, which I wholly support and understand. This is of course anecdotal, and I am not implying that it is a universal sentiment, but just offering an example to answer the original question/statement of people "working on nothing". It is because we have nothing to "work toward".

This pairs pretty well with my experience. (I'm a little older, late 20s/early 30s)

I grew up in a upper-middle class income family, I was first entering high school when my parents were hit hard by the housing crisis in 2008. (Facebook also just started dominating during this time) Eventually the economy "recovered" just long enough for everyone to start telling us that we should sacrifice our 20s while we had the energy so we can enjoy our 30s. (buy a house, have a steady career, start traveling, ect)

Yeah, that advice really turn out to reflect what actually happened.

Travel? - Can't because of quarantine. Quarantine ended, to bad your relationship ended during quarantine, so you don't have anyone to travel with. Lucky enough to have been working remotely? To bad housing prices soared. Decided to invest? Hope you weren't one of the millions screwed over by any of those several historic finical fraud cases that seem to occur multiple times every year. Parents getting to old to work and lost their retirement in 2008? Uhhh... hope they/you win the lottery?

Anyway, all this is really just a long way of agreeing with OP.

Appreciate it, friend. I really do feel as though older generations than us do not understand or care about our situation at all. For example, look at how the first reply to me was gaslighting and seeking to minimize our situation. They do not even attempt to understand or care, because they already "got theirs". Yet they feel as though they need to chime in anyway, telling us that it's all in our head, or that we should bootstrap ourselves harder.

Yea, how can we do that when people become frozen within borders, deported, banned, restricted. We're supposed to take up arms and hijack a plane? Swim? Only to get arrested upon arrival? These older people are fucking high off their own golden years' supply.

And people who are confined to their own narrow, national locality, of nearly any age, especially do not understand.

Cheers.

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 hell, or else suffer using a low-end laptop that isn't capable of the demanding workflows your job requires along with the fact that you're a power user who needs real function keys and (gasp!) a physical escape key to work efficiently on the go, like me.

These companies really seem to be resting on their laurels and toying with customers now, to see how annoying they can be. And what's worse is, we've grown to rely on their products because they happen to build our operating systems and hardware in many cases. Bigger changes to these can have devastating effects and these companies don't seem to understand the responsibility they have to move towards creating a positive, exciting experience for customers while leaving alone the things that work really well. All rather than sowing doubt with a lot of side decisions that make people unhappy ultimately.

Death by a thousand cuts, it really starts to erode confidence in any of them, no matter what they release that should be exciting.

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 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

>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 days. We are just getting more apart and away from everyone day by day with new emerging technology.

It is really pathetic to know that tech is influencing new generation totally in negative direction to what we supposed where they should be leading to. I think even the Parents now a days should parent their child more like it used to in olden days rather than showing them children's rhyme on phone or tablet.

I have stopped surfing social media, they try to isolate me from the truth and what's actually happening and rather feed content which is biased according to my activities and what I like. This really frightens me.

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’ve been thinking about this too. And it’s also usually used as a counter-argument to people wanting to get out of their jobs.

However, here’s what I realized: most people work in “regular” 9-5 jobs. That includes “tech people”, who like to think of themselves as artists, but are not. And it takes like 2 decades to get trained to do a regular job if you take into account k-12 (which trains you to be a 9-5 worker and discourages anything else), uni, and the first few years of professional experience.

So is it that surprising that once you get disillusioned with being a 9-5 worker it would take you at the very least few years to figure out how to not be one?

What I’m trying to say is it should be expected to not know what you want to do. Because even getting to the point where you could do what 90% of the population does take a tremendous amount of effort. So once you want to do something else, it will take a while to figure out too. And you can totally fail along the way as well.

The ideal answer is: "If I got fired tomorrow, I would be doing mostly the same work as before, but maybe less meetings and admin duties."

Careers that fit this answer: artists, writers, musicians, mathematicians, scientists (those who lean more towards theory).

As an freelance artist for 9 years I can say that you have different type of challenges.

Founding usefulness in your work means everyday questions about balance between stable income and making actually new, innovative, non-trending things. Free market have unlimited possibilities, but making art for money is not my motivation to do art.

Poor artists are real and I slowly understand why. If your passion is creativity, priorities are different, which makes hard to pay your bills, but in same time let you go deeper of meaning. Well... It's difficult to describe it actually.

This is such a powerful question (another version of it, what would you do if you wouldn't have to worry about money). Sometime ago I tried to answer it and realised that I don't know. It sparked anxiety, meaning I've been doing something for such a long time 15+ years now without knowing what really my end goal is and why I am doing that.

Whatever its called, zombie or auto/robo mode, the unintentional living, its freaking scary because in most cases if you remove the work identity from a person, there will be a sad shallow shell of a person left.

On a bright side, its never too late. I started actually putting the money to use to create experiences (hiking in Taiwan, diving in Thailand, paragliding in Turkey). Starting to write and build products (finally learning to code for the sake of building something simple and useful instead of setting up kubernetes).

That kind of existence gave me energy, although I do have melancholic nostalgia about former days of building startups and working in a team to get to an exit. It all seem like a war story I will be telling people in my 50s, how I moved countries without knowing anyone, joined a company that got to $50m ARR, grew to 100 people and became profitable ever since.

The work identity we have is a interesting phenomenon, despite feeling happy in life, I do miss ambitious goals and working in a small team of friends and interesting people to reach the highs of professional achievement.

I suppose in the end everything is about the balance.

Thanks for sharing. What are you doing for income now? Are you retired?

>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

I mean, the job I'd be looking for is another tech job?

I do have stuff I want to do in 5,10 years. Maybe even vague ideas of 20 years out. But I lack the funds and the expertise to pull it off. I'm sure many dream of being their own businessman or simply traveling and experiencing the earth without worries of rent. But even for tech workers that is a lifestyle that can't be maintained without some corporate kowtowing (or having a silver spoon).

I’ve been fired recently from a full stack position and I started working on a farm. I’m not in US and I’m not rich enough to afford to stay home.

I feel that in a few months I would like to look around and see opportunities to switch my career to some tradie job like plumbing, which in many countries are paid almost as software engineers. At least it could give me a meaning and probably a bit less uncertainty than software engineer for the future

Even in the US you can quickly get to sw eng level after a few years in the trades, which are booming right now

And bonus, it’s a direct step from there to starting your own business in that trade then making way more

Of course you could start a software agency too but the competition is way more cutthroat

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 can relate a lot to this. Thanks for sharing

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.

Are you in a high cost of living situation that’s hard to get out of? Do you have kids?

If NOT, I would start by thinking if there’s ways you could drastically cut down your cost off living, like moving somewhere cheaper or even looking at Southeast Asia etc if that’s your jam

That would give you more options on the financial side of things in case you wanted to start over or have a go at something with a long ramp up time

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.

I'd restrict that to social media. That and "competitive" journalism are turning society to trash IMHO.