While I leverage AI pretty much daily as a tool, I can’t help but feel like we’ve lost the plot.

I’m bullish on tech workers leveraging AI but I also feel this immense call to get offline and leave tech.

In other words: I’m really fucking lost right now.

My career has only been tech. It’s what I’ve known my entire adult life. It feels scary to even contemplate leaving it, and start over on something else entirely. Especially while the shape of work in general feels so… precarious.

In honesty, the main reason I’m fearful is loosing the comforts that come with white collar work. Even though I think I’ve become a worse human because of those comforts, I struggle to imagine giving them up.

There’s also still a glimmer of hope I have in my heart around tech.

I want to believe it’ll settle back to where it was; not fully, but close enough, to feel inspiring again. It’s possible I’m looking back with rose tinted glasses, too. Maybe it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be back in-the-day, and I’m just romanticizing things.

Maybe it’s me that’s changed; what excites me has changed. Maybe I’m confusing my own emotions with how the industry is changing. I don’t think I’m alone, though. Comments and posts pop up with people feeling the same things as me. We’re stuck in a race to the bottom, not a race towards improvement. It’s innovation for the sake of it, not with real application in mind.

Yes, AI/LLMs/ML can absolutely, 100%, solve real problems. Though the applications I mostly see are in two camps: Increasing productivity with the expectation of us doing more, not less. Or, abdicating ourselves from creative processes in pursuit of profit.

I want to solve problems for people. Make their lives better in some way. Or, at the very least, make people feel and think through words, video or music. Made by me. Not a machine’s interpretation of my instructions. And, if I’m consuming something, I want to feel the person’s vision. I want the subtleties of humanity to bleed through.

AI was once positioned as the all-mighty intelligence that’ll bring us back to a creative renaissance. Yet, all I see are slop spills for the sake of profit invading my feeds and searches.

I’m still waiting for the renaissance. Who am I kidding, though. We likely won’t materialize. Not if the means of production aren’t truly distributed. Maybe, just maybe, an agentic world will get us there. But, I struggle to see a future where leaders and billionaires give up those comforts—the same ones I fear giving up—and redistribute equally. Or, a future where they’re willing to give up money as a concept entirely for more art. If they did, we’d probably see more of that in their actions today instead of in their hyperbolic words for the future.

That leaves me here: stuck between two worlds and ways of thinking. One that wants to continue to participate and re-energize my love for tech and building, and one that feels it’s overly saturated and filled with slop, pushing me towards a different path.

Maybe it’s myopic. Maybe I’m struggling to see something I can’t name yet. I don’t have a tidy place to land this. I just know the version of me that used to feel excited about this stuff is quieter than he used to be.