Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

I have tried the solo entrepreneur route once, it didn't go very well but these days I figure it's hard to carve a niche selling software to people. I feel I'd have better chances in creative arts (game dev) than selling any other piece of software on my own; it's quite a frightening (and exciting) commitment to go down that path.

I have spent the last 3 months dilly dallying around this conundrum, and haven't made much progress. It's scary having to reinvent your career in your 40s.

The effects they're talking about are not as shallow as finding employment in doing the same thing they initially expected to do. The reason so many people feel hollow, in addition to the job loss, is that the deployment of AI coincides with the accelerating hollowing-out and financialization of the world, especially the tech world. I don't think nearly as many people who still can be employed in tech would have such a big problem if they still felt like they were paid to solve problems and make things happen, even if indirectly. Instead what everyone is feeling, even many expert AI users, is that now everyone is increasingly working on creating the appearance of value, not actual value. Instead of serving customers, they make numbers look good to shareholders, hype up whatever they want to hear and line the pockets of people whose level of wealth they will never reach. The number of tech sub-fields where this isn't a theme is thinning by the day. So it goes much deeper than "I need to train for another job" - lots of people make that choice every day. By suggesting that these people need to study AI like you, you're telling them they need to accept the corporate system they hate. Become one with the financial interests.

I am your opposite. I started out by being enthusiastic about machine learning, I was fascinated by GPT-2 or image generation demos years before normal people found out about it. I saw the tech field as flawed, but good enough. And after all, back then engineers had a real value and a voice, they could push back and advocate for better technical solution, they still hadn't become the unvalued scavengers of "look what AI made for me" produced by people who have no idea what they're doing. Now that AI has pushed 80% of tech firmly into the "enriching the immensely wealthy and bringing about a dystopian world" paradigm, I'm looking to go back and do something that will actually benefit real people. Not any of the grass-is-greener farming fantasies people post about occasionally - I still like technology, I just want to use it for real, actual work. That's what OP and many others are probably feeling.

With AI, everything is one-off code, and removes the impetus to make software as a whole easier for future coding.

This is in an age when improving things should be monumentally easier.

But there's no open source reputation to be obtained now. No monetary gain from consulting on open source projects. No reason to open source closed source code because it might be useful to other programmers.

That means software stops improving

I explained why the grief that people feel isn't just tied to employment, but their overall perception of how the world is doing and what it's like to thrive in it. It's especially pertinent because OP isn't pushed out and trying to find something else to do - judging by the post, they're still in the game, still doing all the right AI things. They're just exhausted and questioning the meaning of it all.

I find these emotions to usually be the strongest for people who used to do something they saw as valuable in the past, but don't anymore - or at least people who thought that were satisfied by solving problems even if no one but them would ever appreciate the solution. The B2B SaaS webdevs and similar archetypical solvers of trivial low-value problems are the ones who love AI the most.