Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone.

2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so far removed from their work. Trying to combine work and life is a natural thing, because people used to be tied up in it. Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this.

I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. The solution to burnout at work is to create greater separation between work and home. But the problem itself is that we even need to do this. People can't live to enjoy what they do any more. You need to trade the majority of your waking hours for money you need to live. And when you do live, you're dreading returning to work and feeling burnout anyway. How depressing.

This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health. Issues will be resolved faster. Nobody wants to be constantly angry in their own home. So if you're angry all the time while WFH, maybe you'll be more likely to look elsewhere. Taking breaks from work while at home is so much more refreshing. I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this.

They are suckers. Wait til they realize that they wasted their time building someone else's wealth instead of their own.

That's the sales pitch. That's what I believed when I joined the world of technology. And I felt sorry for them. I have the impression that you felt that at some point. No one else has your passion. I was lucky that reality quickly came to slap me on the face.

I co-founded a company with 4 other people and we were living the life. We were featured in techcrunch, investors lined up to throw money at us, we had a celebrity hanging with us. The paparazzi were never too far. But then, we worked together.

I realized I couldn't work with the CEO. Every other word he used was Hunger, passion, success, haters. I dropped those words from my vocabulary. He believed what I believe to the extreme. It was unpleasant to see it with my own eyes.

When our finances met reality, the clashes begun. I paid our office rent for a little while until I saw that it was in vain. Rather than go through my savings, I asked everyone to get a job until we can weather this downturn. Two people did. The other two threw my own words back at me. I lacked the passion and hunger for being in a start up. I stopped paying rent.

Long story short, it's been 2 years since the landlord changed the locks in the office and the CTO, who was secretly living there, has been kicked out. He has been homeless ever since. He has all the talent in the world, but he would not get a job and sit next to those suckers again.

Completely buying into the startup story does more harm then good. The first thing to remember is that when you have your own company, you'll have to hire employees. And no one can have the "passion" of the founders. The second thing, is that thinking that employees are suckers, gives you mentality of superiority. You feel above others, and end up being an unpleasant person to work with.

There is nothing wrong with being an employee who gets paid to solve a problem. In fact, it's the most important thing in a company. An employee that solves problems then disappears until the next day.

I was drawn to software at a time when it seemed like we had control over things. With the advent of the cloud I feel like that control keeps slipping away more and more. Kubernetes is my new nemesis. I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. Someone once commented here on HN that the k8s trend made them think people are trying to pretend their code doesn’t run on hardware anymore, and that really resonated with me.