You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort. Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.
The startup mythology has a convenient excuse built in. Most startups fail because the market is tough, the competition is fierce, the timing was wrong. External factors. Bad luck. Forces beyond anyone’s control. This is cope. Most startups fail because the founders are bad at business. The market was fine. The idea was fine. The execution was bad because the people doing the execution did not know what they were doing.
There was a moment, somewhere around 2012, when the internet was as good as it was ever going to get. We did not know it at the time. We thought it would keep getting better. Instead it got worse, and we have been coasting on momentum ever since. This is not just nostalgia. The structural incentives that made the early internet good have reversed. What we have now is optimised for different things, and those things are mostly bad for the people using it.
The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space. It is all bullshit. The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is a story they tell to make the distrust sound reasonable.
In 2008, the financial crisis destroyed millions of jobs. The unemployment rate doubled. People lost homes, savings, careers. It was the worst economic crisis in generations and it scarred everyone who lived through it. I think we are headed for something worse. Not a financial crisis. An automation crisis. The kind of job displacement that makes 2008 look like a practice run. This is not going to happen all at once. It is going to happen gradually, then suddenly, the way these things always happen. And when it hits, we will not be ready because we spent the warning period arguing about whether it was real.
I have written a lot of code. Hundreds of thousands of lines across dozens of projects over twenty years. Some of it was clever. Some of it was elegant. Some of it solved hard problems in interesting ways. The best code I ever wrote was none of that. The best code I ever wrote was the code I deleted. A function that turned out to be unnecessary. A feature that nobody used. An abstraction that added complexity without adding value. A clever solution to a problem we did not actually have. Each deletion made the codebase better in a way that no addition could match.
I catch myself being nostalgic for the early 2000s. The internet felt new. Phones were for calling. Social media had not eaten everything yet. Things seemed simpler. Then I remember that the early 2000s included a financial crisis that destroyed people’s retirements, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a job market that locked out an entire generation. The things I am nostalgic for, the MSN Messenger conversations, the forums, the sense of possibility, existed alongside genuine suffering that I was privileged enough to miss.
The most successful software I have ever built ran on technology that was embarrassing to admit at the time. PHP when everyone was doing Node. PostgreSQL when everyone was doing MongoDB. Server-rendered HTML when everyone was doing SPAs. Cron jobs when everyone was doing event-driven architecture. I was embarrassed about these choices at meetups. I felt like I had to apologise for not using the cool stuff. The other developers talked about their microservices and their Kubernetes clusters and I smiled and nodded and went home to my monolith that actually worked.
I used to get bored. Properly bored. The kind of bored where your brain, desperate for stimulation, starts making things up. Connecting random thoughts. Playing with ideas. Inventing problems to solve. This was where my best ideas came from. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from productivity systems. From staring at walls and letting my mind wander with nothing else to do. I cannot remember the last time I was properly bored. I have a phone. The phone has infinite content. Whenever boredom threatens, I pull out the phone and the boredom disappears. Problem solved.
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this. And they will be the last. This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.