Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens.

What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture.

It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and experience it with like minded individuals.

If you're burned out try to find job in libre software, it won't pay as much but as far as spiritual rewards - it's the most you can get from this medium.

> Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering? No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.

Well, actually (and I'm deliberately using my sock puppet account to say this as this is one of the things one should just do and not brag about):

For some of us, many of us, but not most of us I'm afraid, we buy stuff not necessarily because we need it or even want it but partially because of who is selling it.

Every time the kids come to sell the newspaper on the weekend I buy it, read two pages that I coild have read online and leave it on the table in case my wife wants to read it. She doesn't so it ends in trash.

Meanwhile I've been part of teaching one kid the value of honest work. My brother-in-law paid for his first Mac using money he earned from selling newspapers in the weekends. He is an amazing producer now and has been working both as a singke man production team with a local TV station where he lives, at international conferences and sometimes with at least one if not two national TV stations.

Maybe I'm giving another brilliant kid a chance now? Based on the fact that they show up every weekend there might be some potential :-)

This could have been a Scandinavian thing, but I know kt exists in the US too. I think I heard about it in an audio book named something along the lines of "400 things cops know" or something:

> As a police officer if you walk by a lemonade stand or (something else I can't remember) you should buy! Even if you aren't thirsty!

Personally, even as a grown up I've had customers telling me in no uncertain terms to raise my prices, and I've heard my boss (or technically, the operations manager, two steps above my boss) telling me again to tell a vendor from a less fortunate country that the contract was fine but the operations manager refused to pay the ridiculously low price they quoted.

School is for kids, it's not the same thing at all. Kids need development guidance even if it's relatively forceful.

Also most modern schools offer a lot of options.

I have no love for VCs. But let's be real honest. Doesn't the vast majority of startup wealth come from lying? I'm not talking about VCs lying to founders, but founders lying to their customers (selling ads, giving them "free" services while pick-pocketing their data) or exploiting people on the bottom of the food chain (the "gig" economy)?

In other words, everyone should be looking in the mirror.

> You blame everyone but yourself for becoming "soulless". Your very use of this word reveals a great lack of soul. You misuse it to describe working like a machine, an automaton. The nurse who is working like a machine to save lives at great risk to her own has the most wonderful, beautiful soul. What makes you soulless is that you're only thinking about yourself and "new products" (ways to make money) without any hint of a conscience troubled by the decisions made and actions taken in pursuit of those profits, and what that says about who you are. Or maybe the depression was a conscience trying hard to speak out, but it got snuffed by drugs rather than getting heard.

From https://gist.github.com/mGBUfLn9/7cadffcf7c3c23b7376350165a6...

I have read somewhere that there is often _less_ face-to-face communication in an open landscape than with single offices. Possible reasons include an unwillingness to disturb everyone else, and that people in such situations tend to turn inward in order to isolate themselves from everything and everyone around them.

Also (and somewhat contradictory to the above), I expect that, if your colleagues are _too_ easily available, you'll be running to them with a half baked question in your head, only to blurt it out before realising you didn't think it through, and wasting both their time and your own. But before you go knocking on someone's office door to ask a question, you really want to be sure that you know what you want to ask, and that you understand the problem well enough for the answer to make sense to you. Which leads to a better conversation, less time wasted, and better learning.