i’ve been working as an engineer for, i don’t know, the last 16, 17 years. I lost my father when i was barely 10 years old, there was no family money, so everything i have, i built literally with my brain. And throughout it all, whatever i made, the more i do it the less significant it feels. It’s never enough. When the target was ten dollars, ten dollars would have been enough. I get to ten dollars, everything is now twenty. I chase twenty, everything is now fifty. I chase fifty, everything is now a thousand. The goalpost is always moving — and the reason the goalpost moves is out of my control. I don’t know what to do with this. It feels like the world has gone mad.
When i was younger, the world made a lot more sense than it does now. And for obvious reasons — back then i had a heck of a lot less things to take care of. There was essentially zero responsibility. But the more i grew up, the more i got to the point where i am today, the more the world started to make less and less sense to me. Everything is so screwed up. Everything is bound together with everything else, so tightly that things completely out of your control can derail your life, and there is nothing you can do about it.
A conflict here. A war there. Somebody making a decision that impacts the lives of people who have no say in it, who have no way or recourse to stand up and say — no, i don’t agree with this. No, i don’t like this. This is not something i want to participate in. It happens almost every single day. It creates this enormous cycle, and our lives are so entangled, so intertwined with global events that we have no choice. The illusion of choice has basically evaporated in front of our eyes.
And before anyone reads this the wrong way — this is not me asking for help. i’m not going to use the word, but you know the word i mean. It’s not that. It’s just frustration getting out. I don’t have anywhere else to put it, because the deeper level of what i’m feeling right now is not something most people would understand — and even the ones who would understand wouldn’t have anything to say about it.
A very few people have decided, and keep deciding, things that affect the whole world. And whatever they do impacts everybody else. Right now we are in a race for AI, and nobody is looking at how to make it more efficient. Everybody wants a bigger data center. Everybody wants to grab more customers. Nobody stops to say — okay, maybe efficiency matters. Maybe let’s focus on how we’re going to power these things, how we’re going to sustain the need for so much RAM and hard drive and processor, so the people who are going to use it can actually buy a device at a price that is reasonable. Everything has been pushed up. Even simpler electronics that would have cost maybe a hundred dollars a year or two ago now cost three hundred, because the manufacturer cannot afford RAM. They don’t have a choice. They have to make that hard call. That’s one very, very simple example — and it’s not the only thing. There are thousands and thousands more. There is a war happening somewhere else in the world and it’s impacting how much i pay for a bread, how much i pay for a glass of water. It makes absolutely zero sense to me.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that i don’t understand. I do. I understand how this works, and that’s the most frustrating part about it. I understand how this whole global economy thing is ruining everything else. But there is no way around it. Everything is linked. The supply chain of the whole world is linked together, so if one part gets impacted, everything else gets reamed into the ground because of it. And there is no way to control this. And if you belong to a low-income or middle-income country, where a certain level of your population still lives below the poverty line, you are essentially screwed. You have no recourse. Either you don’t have enough natural resources, or you don’t have enough bargaining power to actually make an impact. So all you have is existing. All you do is exist — while the rest of the world does its business, creates its pressure points, acts on its interests, and all of it trickles down to you in the form of frustration. All you get to do is try to survive. The living cost of everyday people all over the world has risen so much that a salary that was considered good three or four years ago is now considered mid-level, because you can’t survive on that salary with a family.
I don’t have a particular frustration with one country or another. I don’t say that. It’s just me, as a human, living at the end of it. And to be honest, i do make a comfortable amount of money. I wouldn’t say i’m rich. I wouldn’t say i’m poor. I’d say i’m firmly in the middle class ground — i have enough to live a life, but i don’t have enough to make generational wealth.
The more i look at the events happening around the world, it’s like everybody is focused either too far into the future or too far into the past. People are clinging to things that happened and want to go back to them. People are clinging to things that are going to happen and preparing for them. And everybody who is living in the present is royally screwed, and nobody is thinking about them. Countries that have enough of everything want more. Countries that don’t have enough keep getting less of it. And the people who were the driving force behind everything — normal everyday people — are just ants under the boots now. The relationship between the wealthy, the corporate world, the business world, and the normal everyday people has become ants and boots.
There was a time when innovation was the driving force. Humanity was focused on learning new things, breaking barriers, going and doing things that nobody ever imagined could be possible — and in 50, 100, 200 years, we got there. But the more we got there, the less things make sense now.
There is a common feeling around that the world is slowly losing its mind. Every time the global superpowers are adamant about something, and because of their chess play, smaller countries, smaller peoples, get crushed — their hopes, their dreams, their ideology, their happiness, everything. The world used to be a lot more sympathetic. There was empathy. People used to understand each other. Now there are divisions. People are afraid of what’s different. People are afraid of what’s not them — whether that’s religion, race, language, ethnicity, whatever. It seems like we found more and more reasons to be different than common ground between each other. We have started to generalize so much that at this point everybody feels — if you’re not with me, you’re against me. It’s a mad world. The idea that because somebody looks different, speaks different, follows a different culture or religion, they have to be your enemy — there is no way. Tolerance is gone.
The world doesn’t seem to understand that all we have is people. Everything everyone does every day is essentially to make the next day more livable, more breathable, more tolerable. And with time, we lost touch with reality. We have bubbles of our own — of our views, of our religion, of our ethnicity, of our language, of our nationality. And the echo chambers inside those bubbles have burst at the seams. Now we get massive, massive displays of public outrage over things that don’t really matter. And the more we look through it, the more it seems like we just don’t matter. It’s disheartening. It’s really disheartening.
People used to be more inclined to do hard work. They wanted to do the necessary work to get better, to do better, to earn better, to get somewhere they can be proud of. Now everything is a shortcut. Everybody wants a shortcut. Nobody wants to put in the work. Everybody wants to jump and be a millionaire overnight. I don’t understand why. There used to be a social contract — you put in the time, you put in the effort, things get better, things become yours. But now the flashy lifestyles of some people are influencing everybody to follow the same path, and nobody explains that you might not have the same success doing the same thing. The market is only so big. The industry is only so big. If everybody wants to do the same thing, who’s going to be the consumer?
Globalization connected everybody to everybody. I can reach somebody on the other side of the globe — 12 hours behind or ahead of me — on the click of a button, and talk to that person in real time. Information is no longer a problem we have to solve. We solved it. We’re past it. But we created another effect — people want to flaunt their wealth, and surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, a lot of them aren’t actually that wealthy. They just show off. The show-off culture has gone so far that at this point, if you don’t show off, you don’t have any value. You are being judged by what you have on display for the rest of the world to see — what you have inside does not matter anymore. It used to. Intelligent conversation used to be one of the key principles of human ingenuity. Now it’s just boring to people. People don’t want to talk about the next big thing, or innovation, or science. It doesn’t have to be technology. It could be a very good looking bird. It could be an interesting color of the sky. It could be an amazing trip through a rainforest. People want bling. They want gold. They want private jets. They want to throw money into the air. If that’s your lifestyle, that’s okay, i’m not judging you — but it creates an effect where everybody wants to be there, everybody wants to follow the formula that worked for that one guy. There were circumstances that took him there. It didn’t happen out of the blue. And it saddens me to see the young and talented minds of this world slowly being poisoned with shortcuts.
Shortcuts are fine when they don’t have a long-term effect. I use an AI, an LLM, to write my code — i honestly don’t remember the last time i hand-wrote a piece of code. Maybe a year, two, three years back. I’ve corrected code, but i don’t write it anymore. But that’s a shortcut where i am in control. I can see what the code is being offered. I can audit it. I can approve it. Other shortcuts are creating dangerous effects in the world.
This fine morning i’m particularly frustrated about doctors. Why? That’s a different story. But i am. Everything has turned into a business where people just want to take the shortest path to money. And that’s okay — making money is absolutely fine. If there is a legal way for you to be a billionaire, please, go ahead, no judgment from me. If you’re making more profit than normal, that’s still fine. That’s capitalism, i understand that. What i don’t understand is the deceptive practices — promising something and then not delivering it, and pocketing the money. Everything runs on speculation now. One bubble after another — housing bubble, AI bubble, dot-com bubble. Ordinary people keep losing money, and the people who made those things happen, who popped the bubbles, are unscathed. Nothing happened to them.
And the worst part is, i do understand why nothing happened to them. I understand why they were protected, why they were bailed out. The cascading effect of a global failure of banks was something that had to be stopped. From a technical standpoint, it makes sense. From a human standpoint, it doesn’t feel right.
I have used this blog for the past 12, 13 years to talk about technical things — maybe a couple of personal things, but mostly technical. Today i just had a lot on my chest, and i thought — this is my personal blog. Even if some prospective employer, or someday some immigration agency, reads this and says, this guy is unhinged. Maybe. But the truth is, it’s not just me. It’s probably 99% of the people in this world who feel this way. When things happen that impact our lives beyond our control, beyond our say-so, where we have no input but we are paying the price — it sure as hell doesn’t feel unhinged. It just feels like we were born into a game played by people who have no understanding of what happens to the small ants when they play their chess. And the whole board is upside down.