I've been thinking a lot about what I want in life. I was stuck in a loop of figuring out yesterday for so long, tomorrow wasn't even a fuzzy outline. Now I'm just about ready for that.
I've decided I really really hate the tech industry. Not as a collection of people (a few are great, most are just not my vibe, many are eerily grinning porcelain dolls filled to the brim with a boiling acid they want to turn the world into).
A digression that I promise is related: Something I never really thought about until recently is that I grew up on the frontlines of the culture war. There was the world here, and the world out there. Each had it's culture, and these cultures were jousting in front of me (well really with me in the middle).
Actually, jousting makes it sound too evenly matched. To me, at the time and in most media I saw, the hereculture was antiquated, regressive, controlling. It had a lot of old ideas that didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny, which it would brutally punish you for not following. Stepping out of line meant you were ostracized, from a community that was just about all you had.
The overculture (out there, on TV) was the 'real world', where people moved on from old ideas, they welcomed different perspectives, and life actually happened. They were the inevitable future, what mattered. I couldn't fall in line with the hereculture's ways of doing things if I tried, and these lovely, interesting, 'important' people were waiting with open arms.
That was a lie.
I left here and went there, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and whatever the fuck else. I couldn't wait for my life to start. The thing is life had already started, and I was not a blank slate waiting to be built by 'the place that builds stuff'. They sniffed that out on me real quick, as I nervously bumbled around their social landscape. Neither of us knew what to do with me.
Turns out they were not waiting with open arms, they were just holding up a contract requiring my assimilation into all of their ways. Many of which were also quite regressive? Like super "might is right"-style meritocracy myth stuff. If I didn't immediately overcome everything in my background so they didn't have to be reminded there were other backgrounds, I didn't have a place.
There are some people who do actually care about welcoming me in, which is nice. But they struggle a lot with understanding what I value. It's taken for granted that I should want to do 'great things', be a 'great things' doer. And the shape of those 'great things' take a particularly career-shaped form. I've grown up seeing enough ineffectual and corrupt institutions and entrepreneurs who use their earnings to buy nothing but the most expensive polishes for their reputations to not buy into that.
After anxiety meds, a cross country move back home, and lots of biscuits n gravy from Tudor's Biscuit World, I realized something important: I grew up painfully aware that these were cultural attitudes that people differed on, and they did not. I saw the people around me reckon with a world that was so real you'd never see it on tv. It was hard, and you learned quick that life wasn't about you. But there was such beauty to it too. People were on similar footing to each other, not trying to trip you so they could outrun you. They were there with you, as annoying as that may be sometimes.
I also realized a deep-seated anger I have at the attitude that our world here doesn't matter. That here isn't where 'things' happen, where 'places' are, or where 'people' live. That we're the last coals of a long-dead fire outside a shiny mcmansion with that fancy heated flooring.
I'm tired of people here being seen as backwards, as 'importance' being defined exclusively by what matters to some trend-setters in a world I don't want to live in. I'm tired of feeling like people have to be interesting or cool or intellectual or tasteful or insightful or "authentic" to exist. And all of those things plus quietly rich to be worthy of anyone's time.
My main job does not pay the bills right now, so I do some delivery driving. A couple of days ago I started off the day with an order going way out in the country. As I pulled into the shared gravel driveway of a few trailers miles outside of town, this little boy maybe 3 or 4 came running up to my car. He had the biggest grin on his face, and was waving his hands. I opened the door a crack while I un-seat-belted his dad's bag of food, saying "hey there!" as he giggled. He looked up at the descending bag, wide-eyed and exclaiming "food!". His dad smiled and waved from in front of one of the trailers as I waited for the kid to run back to him.
That felt like such an important moment. I made $7. I felt grateful to have been of service to them.
This world doesn't exist out there beyond a depressing story, a punchline, an insult, or a statistic. But the people exist here. We have great days, terrible days, little treats for ourselves. We go to weddings, make a new dish that turns out terrible. We watch that new season of Nondescript Hot People Island and maybe see one person from a larger area with some vague cultural similarities to us.
I don't say this to boo-hoo about a lack of representation, but to say that many people out there don't consider us people enough to be someone to build for. It's not that they consciously dehumanize us, we just don't register on their radar at all. We aren't 'interesting' enough to register a blip. And we shouldn't have to be.
Anyway, I hate that the AI people are tired of being forced to use by their bosses is eating up our land, drinking our water, and pushing flood waters into our homes. While the state govt revokes our right to say no, and offsets the tax income they claim they'll create with incentives for data center corporations.
I don't want to work in an industry that is so wrapped up in 'doing the big important thing' that it floods my neighbors out. "6 months to escape the permanent underclass" y'all we've been in it for generations, and 6 months is not gonna be enough. "Anyone can make anything now" says a 26 year old making $120k/yr, paying $700 in fable tokens to impress people on twitter, solving 'problems' only he and the 24 people who liked his post have (and no one else). But he's signaled that he's 'in', and reassured everyone watching that they're all just so much smarter than us.
Yuck.
I don't want to hold my tongue about the money-squeezing privatization that has systematically put ad-supported walls between me and every person I went to high school with. I don't wanna perform enthusiasm for a culture that insists life is only worthy if it aspires to a particular brand of egoic 'greatness'. If I can't find my own little corner where I can actually help people with the skills I went into debt for (student loans and future therapy bills for myself and anyone I talk to), I'm fine being one of 'those people' who pay the bills with something that 'doesn't matter' like handing food to ecstatic children or helping a hospital fix a janky windows 11 installation so a doctor can take notes in an appointment with someone's mamaw, now that her daughter saved up enough to pay out of pocket.