| Thank you for succinctly articulating what I was trying to say long-form. I wallow in the negative as a result of decades of troubleshooting and negative reinforcement loops making me risk-averse. I'm over 50% confident that I will find a fatal flaw within seconds of using any tech for the first time. This is the lens through which I see the entire tech community and all of its failings. Loosely, the tech community appears to be racing towards empire, while I've always felt a kinship with rebels. So, here are 10 off-the-cuff alternative future achievements that I thought were going to happen after the internet arrived in the mid-90s. I believe that our suffering today is due to living in this bizarro future that we got caught up in instead: 1. Developers get connected with real capital on the order of a year's income to get "real work done" outside of the mainstream venture capital and corporate structure. 2. Developers are able to spend their time automating processes instead of having to do the same thing by hand over and over again. 3. Developers live on a modest income under $100,000 in 2022 dollars, requiring less than a 10 hour weekly commitment to meet basic expenses, with the rest of their time going towards getting real work done. 4. Developers have the time to automate such things as solar power, hydroponic robotic gardens, electric transportation, hempcrete buildings, etc so they can put in short one-time risks for a lifetime of reward. 5. Developers are taught how to set boundaries and communicate from the beginning, to prevent getting stretched too thin and burning out after putting in tremendous effort for months/years of their lives thanklessly. 6. Developers have the time to have hobbies outside of video games, to write a blog or travel or exercise or take care of their health or do any number of positive things instead of dying prematurely of preventably illnesses. 7. Developers live in a society where people are informed and educated so that they don't have to spend nearly the entirety of their time performing basic troubleshooting for people who are technologically illiterate. 8. Developers are free of the infinite liability of obligation after helping someone troubleshoot something or working somewhere that was their meal ticket at some point in the past. 9. Developers have a life outside of work, free from artifical deadlines and the expectation that they will perform tasks in a timely manner that were assigned by people who can't do them. 10. Developers have the personal freedom to write languages and frameworks they feel born to make, instead of facing a lifetime of putting up with the lacklusters tools which hold them back. I could go on literally forever so I'll stop there. The thought of signing on for yet another 40 hour job that steals the entirety of my time and motivation makes me feel sick. I hesitate to say these things, because it's like speaking with a therapist. Some things are so negative that they're unthinkinkable, unsayable, as the very act of uttering them can shatter illusions and dissuade a young person from working towards their goals. My goal here is not to be negative, but to find a way to get back to the positive vibes of the late 90s, before the Dot Bomb and 9/11, when the future was so bright that we had to wear shades. This 20 years of dogmatic idiology and wealth inequality and all of the other unenlightened greed and ego-driven kool-aid drinking is unsustainable and has got to end. We can choose a future of windowless warehouses filled with human drones, or one with self-actualization where machines do the work and we all reap the benefits with dignity as human beings. If none of this applies to you, good for you! Go pay it forward and liberate one of the countless millions of people trapped in the rat race who are so tired of it all that it takes everything they have just to make it through each day. |
* Human beings evolved as hunter-gatherers working 2 hours per day to meet their basic needs, or about 1-2 days per week. We're designed to work hard in short bursts and save for lean times, not every single day in overcrowded communities just to scrape by. Until modern tech (and civilization itself) can provide that level of affluence for everyone on the planet through automation, it's self-evidently a bill of goods.
* To accomplish this, "People" should be substituted for "Developers" in the list above, and resources to achieve self-actualization should replace the tech-related subject matter.