Maybe you just dropped a tab of acid and realized you don’t want to have regrets on your deathbed: “What if I regret having worked too much? What if creating value for the stakeholders is not the ultimate purpose of life?”

You don’t need to drop acid to understand what’s happening right in front of your face.

While I liked the article, I can’t help but feel it was basically, “find your dream job” as the overarching message. It did give some pointers of where it could be, but finding those are going to be harder than just landing any job in the current landscape, which is already difficult.

The meme in the article cracked me up fwiw

Ya fucked. We all are.

What do you do if you want to leave tech?

You don’t. Every aspect of modern society needs some amount of tech. But the tech we need doesn’t automatically need to be the adware-laden, spyware-as-a-service enshittified garbage that BigTech foists on us in the name of ever-increasing quarterly profits.

We all have a choice. If you can make tech, you can choose to make tech for humans, not corporations. There are numerous apps that we would all love a simple, cleanly implemented version maintained by a small team of individuals dedicated to creating a useful application that solves real-world problems without ripping anybody off or filling our viewscreens with pointless ads.

There’s a simple equation anybody can follow. Make something useful that someone else finds value in, sell it for a reasonable price. That’s it. That’s all any of us need to do in tech. Grab the off-the-shelf hardware, the open-source software, make something useful, and sell it for a modest profit that the makers can live a modest life on.

We all can choose to be less greedy any time we want. We can choose to work for less greedy people. We can choose to maximize for human impact, or for quality, or for longevity. We do not need to keep choosing maximum profit at the expense of our own ecological well-being.