what if the school gets cancelled?

tldr: ai makes work easier but less meaningful and harder, all at the same time and i am trying to navigate.

for years, the only thing i was wishing for my work was, ending the workday when i close my laptop. and first time ever, it's been happening in the last couple of months. obviously because no more manual problem solving exist in a speed that i used to and also because my brain can't hold this much context change anymore.

it's somehow 10x more work also and it's exhausting. it feels like i am also scrolling short videos at work too. you get the spike of completing the tasks dopamine, but your brain rots with the context switch and lack of deep thinking. i don't know how to even do this the whole 8 hours anymore.

partially it feels fun, because you can literally ship all the ideas with no boundaries now, from design to poc to features on prod in speed of light. doesn't matter which repo, which language, how complicated. it is exciting.

the satisfaction questionable though becuase i feel like customer support. although there is still lots of stitching needs to be done, and owning the process, it's not the same satisfaction as owning the craft. maybe it will change, more abstraction always moves the complexity to somewhere else but in this moment of transition, it's questionable.

ways of working changing. we no longer need each other on development cycle, we don't pair/mob, manually sweat the same problem together. just alignment. all of a sudden, we all wear the same hat, pms need to engineer, engineer need to pm. taking the work done serious is changing. all the rfcs, prs since nothing is hard work, devalues the output super quickly. days are now boost of couple of hours of productivity with multiplied agents and then burn out of "reading". the speed reading own prs (because i no longer even check the change until i have the pr, don't even use intellij anymore), and speed reading others prs, rfcs, channels, skills, new tools, people speed generating. and we relying on each others fed up mushy brains reviewing each others work.

and create value is even more complex in this noise. to sift through the slop, to find the value among this mess; a needle in the haystack literally.

alignment and planning gets problematic. the implementation/experimentation speed is faster now than we can humanly communicate to evaluate the needs across the board and prioritize sanely. because a quarter/half year now feels like years of change in the industry.

uncertainty also increases every day. because maybe how companies function and make money is changing? a speculative view perhaps, but current model of competing for people's impressions from separate apps could shift to where agents combine the interface in a way? like a more holistic user experience could replace that? when the execution is trivial and separate models of recommendations doens't make the same money anymore, when the curation, searching, creating can be done by the user without necesarily needing a different user path, then any moment a bigger fish could provide it in the same bundle? i mean if we assume everything will be agentic, maybe it's where it goes. maybe it's this the phase from feudalism to monarcy? :d maybe it will become hybrid of both, maybe even not at all and will stay as is but it's definetely a question.

an honest tension

all these shifts bring, a big excitement + a big insecurity.

on one side, i am excited that i can play with no limitation on the tokens, so it's nice to be forefront on this with sameminded people trying to figure out, see how they are dealing with this weird moment.

on the other side, it brings a big insecurity. the pressure of feeling maybe i am not making enough use of it in this opportunistic environment. and the question of mass layoffs obviously, which the industry has been stormy on this since the covid times. and that brings another layer of worry that, how long this insecurity would last. even the layoff is not the end of it, what about how long the next company will keep it stable? and as a human being how long you can hold this.

naturally this is now the all day talk at work. it is so much of the reality that i don't have a day that we skip talking about what would we do in the case of layoff, or bets on when.

what if school gets cancelled?

so. although it's unsettling, there is this creepy excitement deep inside me asking, what if the school gets cancelled? maybe unemployment gives the way out of thinking 9-5? maybe it's brings a way out of the system? :clown: although i doubt myself that i would ever give a second of peace to enjoy that thought, it's my all time favorite debate: is there a way out of the system? is it even possible?

the school

working 9-5 is soulsucking for all of us probably, the corporate play, the game. up until now i was in good terms with it in general.

maybe it's the target audience recipe i am in, maybe it's the 30s no kiddos people in my generation, maybe it's the zeitgeist, or maybe simply it's my selective perception but somehow i am repeatedly in this conversation, people hate their 9-5 jobs (even more meanwhile the changes happening). the corporate rat race, the same loop, they want to give a break, long break, the burn out. i get it, i feel it too. but i also get upset from this conversation to be honest because it's goes basically nowhere other than downing me and i don't see any better ideas for myself.

my take is that it's like how shitty is the berlin weather. in winter that's the only small talk we can have. how grey, how unbearable, how it sucks. the more we talk like this, the more we pull each other down. although i am not loving it either, it's not the only thing chaning my whole life in winter. now it's the same with the work, the more we talk, the more i am losing my motivation, whereas actually, i am ok with it for the most part (at least for the status quo up until opus 4.6 :d) i like working with curious minds, solving problems togehter, learning from each other. i like that it gives my brain the place to flex solving problems. i like that it pays the rent, insurance and hobbies. i like that it gives me an orbit to go round around with other routines, giving me the tempo and structure with this 9-5. but of course, if you search for the purpose in it, it's not there, it just enables the purposes maybe at the most optimistic view. so like the weather topic, maybe work is like weather, it is what it is, it's not the only thing defines the day, the state, it's just another parameter to take into account but not the whole equation. like, i like the analogy of life being the garden, so we could call the work as weather, in whatever form it is. there is nothing to love about, there is nothing to hate either.

alternative?

coming back to the main question. i actually don't remember not thinking this debate ever, it's always in the back of the mind, and it's a valuable debate. the question of is there a way out of this system. without the derivative of the system through family or some other institutions. without making my own 9-5 eventually.

i wonder how would it be if i would immerse myself into a creative path, figure out how, figure out the financial part without trading another cage just for a more aesthetically pleasing one to say. but i also wonder how the abundance of time wouldn't follow me to death out of stress. it feels quite daunting to have all the time for myself regulating, how to manage that and how to actually stay in the flow of creating without thinking about the stability? and how not to lead it to finding some search of money making, which eventually would lead to the same level of anxiety/grinding?

and a harder question is what value to create, if that's the path? what conversation to bring? or does any chosen path even have to have a value or impact?

anyways it's a though question. finding something out of this system, findind a way of creating value with the body, soul mind altogether. and also making this with curious minds, true community around it.

no conclusion

this isn't supposed to be pessimistic take, rather geniunely what i have in my mind questioning this topic constantly. i believe like many others, i live by trying to find the connection and understanding while keeping this dialogue open in the background. maybe it's this very much being in between and trying to find the fit, is the living itself. and maybe 9-5 gets cancelled faster than i foresee, and i would need to experiment these thoughts in action :d