Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

Whether you provide all of the basic needs for a man and he farms for others, or whether you provide him a wage.. it's all the same in the sense of removing his autonomy.

You'll notice from the writer's essay that he started to become "more happy" when he was able to exercise some autonomy without all of the pressure.

I've been feeling burnout, although not to the same extent as OP, for many of the same reasons. The main difference is I never stopped loving programming or the creative aspects of making things. Ideally I'd like to be a full time hobbyist programmer, but that seems out of reach financially. If you want to get back into making stuff I suggest doing zero pressure hobby projects focused on whatever you enjoy about the process of making (not around a mission, or users and definitely not around money) and don't actually worry about finishing. Just focus on the act of making stuff happen

Take a week off, step away from the keyboard, find some humans, animals, get a hobby or go back to the one you had. Watch that Naval Ravikant Joe Rogan podcast.

This is why normal, sane, people will put up with the Dilbert-esque world of business. They only have a month's savings and they have a mortgage and two kids to feed.

I don't know how well this will go down in HN, but here's my take/secret:

Corporations and business aren't programming/tech/ science. Startups aren't tech. University and academics isn't science. Faculties aren't science. Peer review isn't science. Venture capitalists aren't tech. Silicon valley isn't tech/ science. "The web" isn't tech.

Let's try another analogy: modern art and art dealerships and art galleries aren't art. Art is taking a photo you like, or painting something you want to paint or building something you want to build. Working at it because you want it and you think it will be beautiful or purposeful: once you're trying to make business and money and find out what's popular and build reputation and sell you tend to stop doing art and start doing something else.

So to bring it back to tech and science.

Science is just the process of systematically trying to use experimentation, empiricism and reasoning to find out what you don't know. That's it! The rest is some combination of empty shells, dressing and propaganda.

Flashing LEDs isn't tech.

Tech is just tools used for some purpose, be it practical or enjoyment. Nothing more. A hammer is tech. A rock is tech. A string can be tech.

I program in R and python and get paid for it these days. But I try to not bring it home, because it's not tech, and it's not science and it's not programming. When I'm programming I'm usually in emacs and lisp. I do photography to produce things I think are beautiful. I cook to provide tasty and healthy and enjoyable experiences for my family (and a scientific mindset can be quite helpful there). I apply science just continuously in life. And I hack together things in tech because I enjoy it and to make my life easier: why just this weekend I made our living room into a video conference centre for our corona virus quarantine: my phone is the webcam and streams wirelessly to the computer, my computer streams wireless display to my TV, my TV routes sound back out through the AV unit, and the room is lit with customisable hue lighting. All done for a few bucks of software and it'll never sell a unit and I don't care, because money and selling isn't tech.