Do you care about tech anymore?

I care more about tech than ever, because... it's amazing. We have solar panels going mainstream, smartwatches are actually useful, sensors everywhere that make sure the pipes don't freeze, people are getting their rare genetic diseases cured.

But in the last few years I've found I care far less about the DIY, small scale, tinkerer-friendly stuff.

I'm actually getting worried about my skills, because I'm currently working a code-light role, and have essentially zero ideas that interest me to work on in my own time, after seeing 99% of them be mostly pointless.

There's close to nothing I want for personal use that I would prefer to what's already out there, and the odds of anything I do ever developing far enough to become something I or anyone else might want to use are pretty low, since that's not something one person is likely to be able to do, and I'm not a CTO of a megacorp.

I don't really mind less choices, more standardization makes everything go a lot smoother. But it is definitely a change. I used to think "Ok, this one thing really sucks, I can do better", now I think "The value of the standard is just that everyone else uses it, nobody is going to switch no matter how well I do, and this crappy thing is good enough".

The more you succeed in your career the less choices you have because you end up at bigger companies

I discovered this effect as well. I always wanted to move up so I could make more choices about projects and technology. Ironically, as you move up, you get more visible and people want you to come work on their project. You often get reassigned to work you don't enjoy at all because you were really successful at something else probably not even related.

Now, a different factor plagues my mind as I attempt to navigate this world. AI driven technological acceleration is a brand new rat race. Gone is the old monotonous rat race, now replaced with the rat race to remain relevant ahead of the ever accelerating technological curve. It is going to be initially thrilling, immediately followed by burnout of being unable to keep up and constantly being obsolete for anything you create.

Even if you had those choices chances are you would be losing interest, most lose interest in the new as they age, they become more pragmatic about it all. Optimal is rarely optimal outside of a few niche areas and often the difference between optimal and good enough is not much, especially when you consider the time spent to achieve that optimum. Things we learn with age. How many new and exciting things have you dedicated a good amount of time learning about just for them to fizzle out and be forgotten? So we get old and let the kids sift through the new for us.

I feel like modern tech is more and more about piling up copy-pasted abstractions that require more powerful hardware to do the same thing, all that in order to produce more garbage with fewer resources.

It's all about hype and potential of becoming profitable, and not so much about solving actual problems.

Tech today is part of the biggest problems we are facing (mass extinction, global warming, end of fossil fuels), and seems to be accelerating in the wrong direction. We need to learn how to do less with less, be more efficient, but more meaningful.

Sounds like burnout