Life Update: An Angry Rant About Feelings and the Future

Here's a little life update, the kind of which I never do.

A year or two ago, I started a company. At first, I was pretty optimistic about what I could do with it. That changed.

Recently, I actually put that company on hold, before really starting anything, because of feelings. I'll just write a bit about those in order to vent, to see if that helps the situation. Probably doesn't but what the hell.

Warning: this is a passionate rant, there's some swearing, and basically nothing new I haven't mentioned in some form or another elsewhere. So feel free to skip it, I don't mind. Here goes.

I'm extremely tired.

I've started to severely regret the fact that I ever graduated a computer scientist. In addition to hating AI, I've slowly started hating computer science, as well. I've started hating my country, my life, the decisions I've made; and I feel like I have been defeated completely, before I even had a chance. There is nothing left for me in life anymore.

What are my reasons for feeling this way?

First, software is practically the only way to make money in IT, unless you have an established hardware monopoly of some kind. This is already problematic in and of itself, but now, software is being made completely worthless. So the only way to sell any of that is to basically "know the right people" and go "wink-wink, maybe you'll have something for me".

From what I can tell you, software was always considered "easy", which didn't exactly lend to a perception of prestige. But now, it's worthless: if you're a software developer, you're essentially a beggar. The only difference is where and how you beg for money.

Furthermore, that beggar status extends to a lot of different fields and jobs now; whether you're a marketer, a diplomat, a programmer, a researcher, or a medical doctor, everything you do now is directly preconditioned by your existing renown. There is no such thing as "letting your work speak for itself" anymore. And if the kids find your stupid product cool, and they start using it, congratulations: you just got incredibly lucky, and chances are you don't have to work anymore after that. A new Minecraft, a new Wolt maybe; a new fascination of tarot cards; some new app. Whatever. Just some new thing you can play with on your phone.

So it's an introvert's nightmare, that's for sure.

I don't know if I'll ever get out of this hell anymore, and I wish things had gone differently for me. I wish I had had the knowledge and the preparedness to make completely different decisions decades ago, so that I could have had some job security today.

I wish people needed something real, and I wish that that something was actually useful, and not just a goddamn lie. I wish all the money being made in the world was not just in usury or rents.

I wish I could seriously, honestly say that there was something good about life. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing worth living for anymore (in the near future).

I just learned about these new PCs you can use to run local LLMs that come equipped with hundreds of gigabytes of memory. And then, once you push your stuff to production, you'll of course be using the Cloud to run it, thereby paying hundreds or maybe thousands of euros a month to some shitty company for essentially nothing, or next to no work. Because they own the relevant hardware, ultimately.

It's like what the fuck are you talking about? Do you know when the last time was when I purchased a product – any product? I'll tell you: it was years ago. And the time before that was several years before that. Because it's all fucking irrelevant. People aren't making stuff anymore, and the risks have become astronomical.

So for example, if you're a musician, dammit you might as well be a pornstar, as well, because that's a good way to garner some of that necessary attention. Maybe put up an Instagram profile and all the rest of that fucking shit.

Some people talk about "doomscrolling" as if that were still a thing. Maybe for some, it is. But I don't do that shit; why would I? The moment you realize there's nothing there, FOMO completely ceases. You just realize that all this talk, all this babble, is a big load of nothing.

Maybe someday it'll get better, but now, it's hell. Maybe God himself will fucking save me and there's going to be some point to this computer shit.

Still, since I'm basically dirt-poor, I'll have to stick it out. I don't actually have a choice: I can't study anything else in order to quickly pivot and change careers; I can't make big hardware investments; and I can't really make a piece of software an LLM wouldn't be able to – in theory – make. Of course, practically, that software still wouldn't be exactly the same, because if I wrote it myself it would be in my own style, but if you consider software as an investment, then I have zero leverage as a developer there. In fact, all the software investments anyone's ever made are now relatively questionable, if they cost more than a few grand to make.

There. That's a piece of my mind right now as I'm typing this. Thanks, Nvidia. Thanks, Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and friends. I fucking love you.

Moreover, on a final note, I suppose it's worth thinking about what happens as I get older. Because chances are, I won't exactly become more interested in these superficial things.

My dream was to basically fuck the Americans in the ass and create better services and websites than Google does, but it really looks like that bridge is burning; it's on fire as we speak. So, that stupid dream is on hold for now. Maybe it will never happen.

I feel like I want to retire already. I feel like I want to just hit the reset button. I don't care about computers anymore. But at least I can afford to keep my own blog. Yay.

I don't know where I'm going to go. I don't particularly want to whore myself out on GitHub or LinkedIn – owned by Microsoft. And by the way, I don't think an independent country should rely on an American company to produce their websites for them either.

IT is a stupid field, and I'm full of regrets at this point in my life. We'll see how things turn out.