Capitalism is like a sleight of hand trick, a cheap con designed to distract with stupid toys and distractions while it robs you blind.
It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides:
- Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment.
- Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death.
- Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation.
- Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood.
- Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats.
- Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you.
- Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific.
- Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers.
What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value".
> Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.
Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer.
You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth.
The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.