RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376219055579156
I know a lot of people, in software and otherwise, who are feeling things along these lines.
Hold on, whatever tools you’re using, just hold on to your sense of purpose and meaning. There are a lot of forces at work in this world that want to rob you of that. Your feeling of losing that is not recognition of some new fact of our reality; it is you experiencing a psychological weapon.
One advantage of being an artistic weirdo who makes completely commercially non-viable music is that I have a •lot• of practice forging that sense of purpose and meaning for myself when the world is aggressively not handing it to me.
Software development has been coasting on a wave of profitability / employability for several decades, and as a discipline perhaps has an underdeveloped sense of intrinsic purpose. Now is a good time to for us to redevelop that as a community, regardless of future job market prospects.
Tips I can give you from my experience as a musicial weirdo if you’re looking to redevelop a sense of intrinsic purpose and meaning:
Beware of leaning on extrinsic validation (winning a contest, getting a grant, getting a job) for your psychological well-being. Those things may be important for practical purposes, but psychologically they are all empty calories.
Three •good• sources of purpose and meaning in your work that can sustain you:
- your own sense of satisfaction in your work
- sharing work via meaningful, sustained human connections
- the sheer joy of making and doing
A particular dissonance in my musical life is the aggressive non-interest of the world in my music in competitive circles (commerce, grants, whatever) and the warm, passionate enthusiasm it receives when I share it with people in person.
What’s worked for me: creating contexts of joy and mutual support where I can share with people — not just share generically in general, but sharing with specific actual people where there is a human relationship underlying the sharing — and then sharing.
These contexts by and large don’t just exist on their own; we have to •make• them. It’s not a thing you can just decide to do and then it’s there. It’s damned hard.
Software folks should pay more attention to the musicians and artists who are creating artistic spaces: neighborhood festivals, house concerts (whether “salon” or punk band in the basement), converted warehouses, street art, that kind of thing. Watch how artists on the margins don’t just •look for• space, but •create• it — and how it’s rooted in community. That’s a model to follow.
My piano teacher — a lifelong professional who’d played Carnegie Hall and had one of his trio’s recordings featured in…Time magazine or something, I forget — said to me in his 80s, “I think I’m finally learning to be a true amateur.”
@[email protected] I've rediscovered programming for fun. For the first time since I was 14.
Here’s an attitude that can nourish and preserve.
@inthehands One positive for me, I think, in the recent wave of nonsense, is that it’s sharpened my sense of what matters — that I actually enjoy doing it and being good at it.
Tech jobs are highly cyclical and lots of the gen AI stuff is ridiculously overhyped, and I’m hopeful that the wheel will keep turning and the professional prospects of software developers will improve again…assuming human civilization survives, that is.
But what I said above applies regardless. We should all be doing this meaning-making work all the time, even in the best job markets. In fact, that work is a part of •making• human civilization survive.
Paul Cantrell
Woozle Hypertwin