I still have an interest in tech. Whenever I read about new sensors to keep kids from being locked in hot cars, or efficient smart thermostats, or a kerosene lamp being replaced with LEDs, or even just drone based light shows, I usually think "Yeah, this is totally worth being spied on 247".
My problem is that I have no clue how you actually get involved with anything that matters unless you're top 1% skill.
I'm perfectly happy with connection as a modern requirement, it replaces the requirement to dedicated many square feet to using and storing papers, but endless scrolling and the algorithm that makes you keep doing it is fucking depressing to think about, and casts kind of an ugly hue over the whole tech industry, and so much of the industry is dedicated to delivering content people don't even particularly want.
I've also mostly lost interest in DIY tech for the most part. I've done lots of open source work, usually nobody cares. The only time I get excited is collaborating with existing projects.
I don't know anything about how people start new projects and actually have them take off, so I don't think about it much anymore. Startups mostly feel like scams to me.
Like, many of them provide a real useful service. But I wouldn't recommend most of them to anyone or use them myself. Most of them don't do anything that some cheaper service already does, and they usually have a bigger dev budget and a more predictable future. I don't want to tangle up my workflow with something brand new run by 3 people without a really good reason.
And worse, a lot of them don't provide anything useful.
And I'm even more disillusioned with DIY scale personal use tech. I can't think of any software I want that wouldn't take years to write, and I'm not going to spend 3 years working on some software just for myself. I'm sure I can save up and just buy a solution in that time. Anything I can do in a weekend probably already exists and I'd rather just use that.
And to make it worse, I'm not really happy with the tech community right now. The "Hacker ethos" is basically anti-tech. They only care about code as an exploration of ideas, and seem to hate real usable software in practice. They want pen and paper and film cameras back, and seem to care much more about even small amounts of metadata privacy than all the benefits tech could bring.
It's less this exciting underground scene building the future as this sad group of weekend tinkerers who hate the modern world.
I'm not sure where that leaves me as far as doing anything impactful. Maybe eventually I'll try again to start yet another new project and see if it gets any traction.
At least I have a job that does provide some level of real value, even if it's just entertainment.