| Before I post this: feeling overwhelmed by awfulness in the world can feel overwhelming and discouraging, and can stifle motivation. Below is a call to follow your motivations, but it might come off as a lot. I get that. If it’s compelling at all, take time to let it sink in, and you can take whatever you take from it at your own pace. Please don’t feel discouraged if you want to do important work but feel overwhelmed figuring out where it starts. - - - There are opportunities to use your skills for positive impact. I know because I found one, and I’m working on tools which people use to improve and save lives. Well, I should clarify: I had the luck of having the opportunity brought to my attention by a friend who knows my values and wondered if I’d be interested. I may have found it on my own, but I don’t know! Assuming I wouldn’t have (which is a pretty safe assumption, I wasn’t aware of any of the projects or relevant technologies which would’ve put it on my radar), what brought this opportunity to my attention was having long term connections outside of tech with people who share my values, and enough familiarity that there was a tech overlap that my friend recognized I might be interested. I met the friend through protest circles, the intro for the opportunity came almost 20 years later. That’s not to say that kind of timeline is inevitable. It’s to say I’m overwhelmingly happy to be doing meaningful work today, and I think it’s unlikely I’d be able to say so if I’d been focused on the career path to this. My sincere advice is to build relationships with people who are working on issues you care about outside of tech or at least make those connections outside of a tech context. If you want to make the world a better place, people already working on that are much much better people to know than people discussing the topic on a forum (regardless of all of the good things about HN) bourn of startup VC funding. If you’re socially inclined, go to a neighborhood or a community group meeting organizing around something you care about, instead of a tech-centered meetup. If you’re looking for inspiration or news about how tech is having a positive impact, take some time off HN and start finding sites where those are the focus. Edit: deleted the thing which might be construed as promoting my team’s projects. If you want to know, I’m easy to contact. I’d hate for this to be misinterpreted as some kind of shill. |