Comment by manlymuppet

In my defense I didn't suggest I cannot :)

I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.

There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.

If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.

So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!

>Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity?

It's the stakes. Sure it was fun and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately it meant something because there was a prestige that came with cultivating a skill that brought the ultimate external validation: abnormally high pay and prestige. It was the blending of those two things that made it so special. Not a soulless pursuit of money, but also not a naive pursuit of something for passion alone. You could spend your days diving deep into something fascinating, and it was highly lucrative to do so. Now it seems we're left to choose one or the other.

Not the OP. But a few things:

Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.

Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.

I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.

At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.

So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. "Join a book club" is like "go to the gym". A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.

When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.

Not the same as me having to tackle a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.

That's what we're losing. Or, effectively, what has been stolen from us (all my code, all my novels, all my music) and re-sold by people who don't care to other people who don't care.

In an Ayn Rand sense, I'll just stop creating anything for the public, and so will everyone else who has creative ideas. The world can drown in a cesspool of regenerated slop that they stole from the people who had ideas; it's all a tower of babylon, owned by a few companies now, so you won't get very far in making any slop apps/music/writing profitable. There's no barrier to entry involving the brain now, just how much money you have (and no one will make any more money now who doesn't already have it; there will be no further upward mobility from education or effort).

No, just go join a gym, and run on a treadmill. Your input in the shape of the world is no longer needed. That's the general idea.