Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

That's not rock bottom. The knowledge inside major religions goes much deeper. Even if you have your life, relationships and ego bound together there are natural forces that bring us to one eternal doom.

You can have relationships based on emotionality instead of transacted value. It will be the norm for the next decade.

Belief in control of the larger world is trivial, we are the larger world. Gaze deeper into death, it is a tool for removing somethings or patterns that dont work anymore and it reveals more life underneath. Shame is the fear of disconnect, or rather the shame of shame is the fear of disconnection. Going through shame is normal, revealing and your reaction to it is far more important than what shame is as a social force or a feeling.

Flirting with death and being the outlawed cup that breaks and spills its relation to water everywhere is cool and all but people lose interest when you stop flirting and start breaking.

This seems like great advice if you're your own manager. The other 99% of us would be fired for following his advice unfortunately.

Text of the gist since it's a bear to read on mobile:

"I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place. Not really. I was simply drawn to it because I was drawn to it. Writing programs was fun. Figuring out how nature works was fascinating. Science fiction felt like a grand adventure.

Then I started a software company and poured every ounce of energy into it. It failed. That hurt, but that part is ok. I made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. This experience made me much, much better. I'm satisfied with that.

What's not ok is how things ended. Many of the investors turned out to be bloodthirsty vultures who tore the carcass to pieces. Had we IPO'ed, these same people would have stood there with giant smiles telling everyone how they'd always known we were special and how they'd supported us all along.

I lost many friends. Throughout the whole thing I was lucky to meet many brilliant, creative, talented people. Together, we worked so hard. Now we don't talk.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I contributed to these failed relationships. I learned a lot from that too. It wasn't my finest hour, but I can sleep at night fine. So I eventually decided it's mostly nobody's fault. This is just the reality of what happens to people when extreme stress ends in failure.

Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now.

So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton. I know that's not the whole picture. It's not even most of the picture. But that's the part I can't unsee.

For a long time I couldn't focus on any remotely intellectual pursuit. I even thought I permanently damaged my brain. But eventually I started exercising, went on anti-depressants, and started therapy. Then I got a job that has nothing to do with technology. Slowly my happiness returned, and with it my ability to focus. I do a lot of sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook a lot. I got into knot theory. I find it fascinating and can do it for hours. I'm surprisingly not bad at it. So I know I still have my faculties.

But I still can't program, can't write, can't think of new products, can't read science fiction. I'm mostly happy, but there is always a hint of dissatisfaction underneath. I miss the creative, optimistic person I once was. I want to see past the cynicism. I want to write programs and make things. I want to work with a ragtag team again to bring something to life that didn't exist before. I want to learn how to see past the bullshit and be creative again. But I can't get myself to do it. I hear the call and I know there's still a spark. But when I take even the smallest step everything turns bleak and mundane. It's like the magic has been bled out of me and I don't know how to summon it back.

Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?"

For me the simplest barometer is, if I'm gone tomorrow, how long they will remember me/talk about me. For people at work, I think it'll probably be an hour or so or maybe a day if I'm lucky (+ when they notice old commits). Helps keep the perspective clear.

This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made. There is one interesting part which is the core and that’s the MVP. Working in this stage is exciting and fun to make and then there are years and years of slog smoothing out the edges and making it ready for production, which left me similarly disillusioned especially when my view of the real world fresh out of college was that every product that exists is interesting and perfect. Long story short, I worked on that boring project for two-ish years and saw the horrible political environment begin to deteriorate my once-ok team. I say once-ok because I convinced myself during that time that I liked my work because by all measures of society, I was successful, and having no knowledge of other teams I didn’t think there was an alternative. This was all I ever knew and thought every team in tech is like this. Which for the most part is actually true. Despite what Google and other big tech companies’ flashy recruiting and marketing, something like 99% of the engineers in those companies are doing boring shit to keep the money flowing . I also went through the exact same thought process where I thought my spirit had been drained and I could never get the excitement back because of this realization. I also often wondered if I had been permanently changed because of the experience and thought I would never feel creative again. However I made a big decision and took the leap to join a new team and couldn’t have landed in an environment that is more the polar opposite. And that is what gave me my spirit back. You need to find a product in a FAANG, or startup that you actually are passionate about and get to grow your own team and that will give you your passion back. Find a position which is an exact match for your skills and do not settle at all. If a position is not perfect do not even consider it and ask as many probing questions as you need and contact current members of the team to check for inconsistencies. Good luck and I hope you can find another project that brings you passion.