My issue with technological progress is that at this point most of it seems like it is no longer of benefit to the average person. Rather it is more about ways for corporations and governments to control us or extract more (e.g. money, data) from us. Most consumer tech is trending towards enshittification.

The exception to this is medical advancements.

Sounds like maybe a bit of depression could be hiding behind your anxiety about tech (if so, talk to a professional). I agree with some other takes that getting offline can be helpful. I got offline (as much as I could) for two weeks and it did a good amount to improve my mental health.

The irony is the use of technology to ask the question. Your level of tech use and engagement is a personal choice. You can minimise or stop anytime. Most choose to minimise, I’d suspect because some innovations are quite useful.

Also, in an existence where the only constant is change, where every moment and conscious perspective is uniquely different and where novel complexity only increases, it would be wise to cultivate patience and a neutral perspective on change.

I fully agree. As a 43 year old, who used to be an “early adopter” I’ve found that I don’t fucking need it. I’m fine with retro games. I’m fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences. I don’t need “social media”.

On the other hand, I really like that my car doesn’t pollute. I really like that I can power my house from the sunlight that normally just hits my roof and is absorbed. I really like that I can work from home.

There are tradeoffs. For me, what works, is just not giving a fuck. But in like, a content/nice way, instead of a nihilistic/depressed way. If you know what I mean?

But being a Luddite does have its appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

I still enjoy progress, but enshittification is exhausting.

Stop doomscrolling.

For what you are writing, you are just getting angry at things you read not at things you live.

Revise which sources are you reading. If they made you unhappy, it is worth keep reading them? Most of those things won’t happen anyway or if happen you could easily avoid. I don’t feel the need to have an “smartwatch” so I just don’t have one, for instance.

Find some sources that make you happy, and you’ll find an improvement. Some people seems to only write things with the goal of making you feel miserable.

I’m just happy following my tech news about open source development and space exploration.

The problem isn’t necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuse

I’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.

What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.

It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn’t be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.

Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I’d still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn’t complain.

Innovation keeps being forced on you

It’s not innovation, it’s just ads.

It feels to me like you don’t hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.

If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you “having” to adapt to not “fall behind”, when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them…

Would you really mind progress that much?

I think technology’s great, but the way people have chosen to use it is occasionally awful.

The technological progress is what is not normal. Modern humans have been walking around, living their lives for 300,000 years. Agriculture is less than 12,000 years old, basically still brand new in comparison to the span of time that people just like us have existed for.

For nearly all of human history, generation after generation after generation for thousands of years lived very similar lifestyles with marginally improved, but familiar technology.

It is only in the last few hundred years, a tiny tiny sliver of the human timeline, that we have seen rapid technological progress that has completely changed the way people live their lives from one generation to the next. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations now are seemingly happening several times within an individual’s lifetime.

We have barely even had any time to adapt to agriculture, let alone capitalism or air travel or instant global telecommunication or AI, etc. So don’t be too hard on yourself about feeling fatigued. I feel it too. We are living in an alien world that we aren’t really “meant for”. You’re “supposed to be” a hunter-gatherer.

What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.

This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.

This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.

The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.