Ever felt like this world is becoming more intense the longer you live? Noticed how much more aggressive it’s been feeling lately? I’ve spoken to many folks, and they all are struggling to keep up, let alone thrive. Perhaps that’s saying something about the way the world works.
With all of their opinions, and with my recent layoff, I felt like there’s a lot of time to reflect and take stock of how things have been and how things are. I’ve turned a new decade, and there’s a start difference now. Let me tell you a bit about how this world has been changing for me.
Beginnings
12 years ago I scored my first gig, helping someone move office spaces while they were on their way to set up a startup. Alongside that I got my first job working in the bakery section of a large retail store, and working two nights a week at a bar. All at the same time. From each of these gigs I took a few learnings that I hoped would translate into future life.
From the hauling gig I realized just how terrible I was at talking to adults. At 18 years old I still felt incredibly naive and woefully incompetent as an adult, despite graduating high school and officially becoming an “adult”. The pressure of making small talk, or sitting in a car driving long hours with a man who I didn’t really know nor knew how to know was tough. I was someone who was locked in his shell, despite how sociable I could be, so making connections was an extreme challenge.
The bakery gig was the area I strived in though. While the hauling gig made me more focused on shaking hands with different types of people, it was the bakery gig where I learned what it meant to take care of people, even if they didn’t make that easy for me. I saw first hand the power of loyalty. I worked 12 hours on Friday and Saturday from 6 to 6, baking bread, serving coffee and hot dogs, and greeting people. I learned what routine was, I learned how important it was to some people, and I learned there that I saw people coming back, and how they appreciated the little things I could do for them.
The bar gig taught me a lot too, about how kindness doesn’t always cut it. I also learned how scared I truly was of conflict, and that it’s important to set boundaries, a skill which I felt I did not invest enough of at the time. I vividly remember one customer taking aggressive advantage of my inexperience and aloofness to score 5 free Bacardi colas until my boss told me to tab it and demand payment, on a night where there was no security. Working that job right after the bakery from 8 to 3am was tough, but I also learned how invested I can get in something that seemed so trivial and simple as a job. But that’s a post for another day.
I took those learnings into my university program, and into subsequent internships, learning to take agency, make more connections, learn to talk to adults, become stern and work hard with passion.
Back then, despite the crazy schedule with little sleep, I could actually keep up. Even when I had a summer with two simultaneous internships, I could still keep up, if not make headwinds and get ahead. Sure I was young, but something else was pushing me to my limits.
But these days, I don’t feel like I can, even if I was that young person from back then.
The hustle
I’ve lost 4 jobs now in my 8 year career. One was a mutual parting, one was economic, one was due to COVID, and the last one was also economic. Funnily enough, outside of the second one, I saw all of them coming, and no matter how hard I fought and sacrificed, I couldn’t keep my job. It has been incredibly tough, but for the first time ever, being 30 now, I thought I could apply the diverse skillsets I’ve earned over the years and turn them into a new opportunity, just like I did all those times before. As Denzel Washington once said, “Fall forwards”.
But this time feels different. For the first time there’s no opportunity granting me a chance to prove myself. I don’t know how to stand out, and it feels like I have to rig a system as opposed to being myself. Moreover, no matter how hard I work, I cannot seem to achieve what others have achieved before me, and the choices I make seem to not favor my chances at the stability I so desperately crave.
From that bakery gig I craved a taste of routine, but I seem to never be able to stick to it. It feels like these days the world is in dire need of brevity, but yet within those confines there’s not enough I can say to attract people. And I find that the experiences I feel are so tough and hard to keep up with. Back when I could work 60 hour work weeks voluntarily, had motivation and passion to such an abundance that it overflowed… seems like all of that has been kicked out of me, and now I can barely, if at all, keep up.
The way the world works has changed a lot in four years. It’s become a rigged system. Now I am not just needing to convince people, I need to convince an AI to take a chance on me, just so I can reach humans. I have to beat the auto-checks that so many hiring systems have set up to combat the quantity of candidates, and they do so by unintentionally filtering out quality, because there will bound to be someone who makes it through that is a fit anyway. As such, more qualified and quality candidates are stuck trying to beat the game the system demands of them to play, just to get the opportunity for a chat.
They all say the world is changing and we should just adapt. But I struggle to meet people who take a second and ask themselves “why?”. People are so lost in the hustle that not a single one of them seems to bother wasting time taking a breath and asking that question.
For as long as I have been a working adult, people have held the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and all these figureheads to such high esteem. While I was in university for a while I too was entranced by the messaging of Gary Vee and Steven Bartlett. I was early in my realization that these people are heavily flawed, and even potentially dangerous. Elon, who my CEO father deeply admired, I had always seen as someone who got lucky and bought his way to the top through extremely sketchy and grueling means. Even Steve Jobs, who is often credited for the iPhone and smartphone revolution instead of Jean-Marie Hullot, Henri Lamiraux and Scott Forstall, was not as grandiose as he truly was.
Hard work has always been exploited. But the people with the money deem people as resources to further their vision. The concept of a visionary has tainted what never gets nearly enough credit: the people in the shadows that did the actual work, and many times the ideating. Linkedin has encouraged people to post content that puts themselves on a pedestal ahead of even their own staff, encouraging a writing style that encourages that self grandeur that arrogant people have weaponized for their personal brand to inflate their own wealth and interest.
It’s not that I don’t get it. I do. It exists to avoid wasting time, optimize profits, and motivate people.
No time to waste
Lately, it feels like dishonesty, radicalism, and aggression takes a higher stage. And this happens on any side of any topic, whether social, political, economic, or even what time you wake up. I’ve quit Twitter, or X, altogether to avoid this rhetoric, but even on other online platforms or news outlets, or even in offline environments, these approaches still take centerfold. Misinformation is spread so radically, and there’s such a demand to call people to action that no one is listening anymore to people saying “slow down and think about it for a second”.
I first noticed it with Brexit, where misinformation was cranked up to ten convincing millions of brits to vote “leave”, only to later actually to have been misled. An example is that notorious 365 million figure they put as advertisement on buses. Yet, all the fact checking that the Liberal party needed to do couldn’t keep up with UKIP’s poll growth rates. It’s because people latch on to the crazy statements and loud yelling, or the buzz terms that they can easily align with. Slogans convince people, not cohesive plans.
No one ever stops to think about our short but sweet approach and ponder “should that be the approach we take on matters like these?”. Because ultimately, it works. It serves the immediate need, despite the consequences that will almost certainly follow.
As a PM I’ve learned that the customer often times doesn’t really know what they want, they just know there exists a problem. It’s up to you to listen and spot it. But lately the world seems to be filled with such obvious glaring problems that no one is really building solutions for. It seems like businesses are losing touch with their customers, and are more focused on their own needs.
Even AI has formed an extremely mainstream bubble, which feels like a weird pattern by now to me. First Crypto, then Blockchain, then NFT, then Web3, then Metaverse, and now AI. We jump on trends way too quickly before understanding and thinking “actually… this isn’t really a solution to the problems that people are having”. They’re all disconnected buzzwords.
I began to realize in my last company that AI just wasn’t a direction worth pursuing pretty quickly. I always thought AI creating music was never going to be legally feasible, since I learned a bit about machine learning back in my first year of university and understood the foundation on which that would need to be built. It’s a yoink and twist. You need something to yoink before you can twist and make something “new”.
But then I thought about how easy it would be to let AI generate stuff and just how much money you could earn by bloating a marketplace. We see dropshippers and manufacturing businesses do it all the time where they go bankrupt, rebrand, and reappear faster than a lawsuit could ever take shape, or my personal favorite, choosing a different influencer to sell the exact same product through. But the ramifications simply cannot keep up. An automatic cat litterbox that kills cats? Sue them! Oh they’re gone. Ooh that’s a new automatic cat litterbox! Oh, it kills cats? Sue them! and the cycle continues.
We see this with Google Image search results, or my personal favorite, Adobe Stock. The content available on offering has seen the AI-generated content severely outpacing the upload rate of authentic ones, and if new models are to be trained off of that, it’s only a matter of time before the AI trains off of itself. And when they make glaring mistakes, then they are bound to repeat them, not patch them.
Why sell tickets when others can buy them en masse and sell them for twice as expensive? Why follow GDPR when we can train our AI models on user data to get millions in investments now at such a massive scale that no legal entity can keep up? Why not autogenerate 10,000 images a day and post them on stock marketplaces when it could make me hundreds of euros a day for free? Why be honest to the public if it doesn’t get you votes?
Dog eat dog
This world is moving at breakneck speeds and is beginning to toy with people’s lives. We saw the consequence of arrogance when it came to gaming the system back in 2008, we saw it in COVID, and we’re seeing it again now. We see it regularly. But this time, it feels different. It feels more urgent. It feels more insane. And yet, it somehow feels more invisible than ever before.
I’m 30 years old. I am fighting to keep what remains of my passion and motivation to work hard and learn in the Tech industry. But it does seem that the way the world used to work just two years ago has long been forgotten. And even back then, the world changed drastically from just two years before that, and before that it was 3 years as well.
It feels like the amount of moving forward that’s happening is causing me to feel like I’m falling behind the curb, and in a dog eat dog world where I’m not willing to bite as hard, I’m not keeping up.
So what should I do? Should I swap careers, should I spend more time and effort growing? With all the growth that I’ve made thus far, how is it that I cannot get a job at all any longer, regardless of how qualified I am?
There’s a lot to think, but in general, in a Dog eat Dog world, perhaps the best thing to do is become the hunter, or avoid becoming the hunted. I need to make my choice. What about yours?