Everyone in tech is sad

A m a z i n g essay by Aaron Horwath. It opened up so many different new threads of thought in my mind.

That’s the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill. It is the opiate of commuters in quarter zips. And it works. It keeps talented people showing up at the office to argue over reports and strategy documents and rebrandings with the seriousness of pediatric heart surgery.

Spectacle is a feature of late capitalism in which life, rather than being directly lived, is perpetually mediated. There is always something between us and the thing we are supposed to be experiencing. I don’t talk to my mom; I text her. I don’t travel; I watch other people travel on YouTube. I don’t have sex; I watch porn. In late capitalism, the medium replaces the experience.

For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.