I don’t know yet what’s next for me. We’ve been hearing this a lot lately, in big and tiny tech alike. We hear it from our dear friends and family, from that nice colleague we have had small talks with in the pantry, and from the countless unfamiliar names on LinkedIn whom we can somehow relate to.
We hear it inside our head, our own voice whispering from the void:
Hey there, are you listening? Does anybody know where to go from here?
Our work day has become a pendulum. Some days we feel supercharged; like a red-pilled human with a genius fabricated friend, we can do anything. Code gets written and products get shipped. Problems are solved faster than ever. Or are they?
Other days, we feel like a shell, either empty or over-stuffed with knowledge that is bound to be replaced, or so they say.
I don’t know yet what’s next for me. Please, let’s not take this claim lightly.
I spoke to a few young people about how they felt about their future. Were they scared of unemployment? Were they worried that their education would no longer be relevant? How did all these negative outlooks really make them feel?
The answer truly bothered me, though I was not surprised.
“We feel sort of numb, so we just ignore it.”
Emotional numbness is a form of dissociation or suppression. This is the price of knowing too much but understanding too little. We stop connecting the situation to our own reality. We hide from reality to avoid accountability. And in the process, we lose our agency, albeit by giving it up.
But who is taking it away from us? Deliberately.
Every day, we read that jobs will be lost—our skills will be obsolete and nothing can be done. We consume anecdotes of doom and whistleblowers warning of catastrophes. We witness these tragedies with our own eyes, flooding our screens in an engineered infinity that overwhelms our minds until we can no longer think, and worst of all, feel.
You don’t know yet what’s next for you. It’s OK. I don’t either.
But it shouldn’t feel like nothing. It should feel like a cold plunge in the icy ocean or the soft heat from the autumn sun; it’s a call to hunt or to rest; it’s our cue to move or take a break; it can even be something in between—anything but nothing.
Whatever direction you choose, even if it seems like it’s going nowhere you know, bring out the human in you. The species that feels and acts according to logic, emotion and character: pathos, logos and ethos. The species who evolved because we keep on searching for what’s next. We moved and built communities; we invented tools; we wrote dogmas and treaties and turned them into music, plays and pictures so we understand who we are as we change.
To not feel is to lose that understanding. To have no feelings makes us an easy target. Our alert system shuts down. Our defense mechanism deactivates. We stop noticing dangers and start missing opportunities. We lose every motivation to win.
That’s how some cruel kings want it to be. They confuse you on purpose. They want you to stop trying. They put you in a wheel to spin you around until you bleed. They extract your emotions so they can erase it for good. Are you going to give them that?
We may not know yet what’s next for us, but we can still feel: we will show our rage and compassion, laugh and cry to the extreme. We will search for new friends and enemies and rewrite stories that pierce deep into our hearts. We will recite silly jokes about the world as we weep, and we will turn them into lullabies. Because our vulnerability is a strength that is hard to calculate. We are the unpredictable variable in the market, the unfathomable freak of nature.
We will not be numbed.
A note from a fellow tech professional:
If you’ve been feeling numbed from what you’ve been reading about tech these days, I feel you. I recommend being in nature and laughing with friends. We have the land and the seas all around us and a handful of good people on our side. It may not give you a straight answer about what’s next, but it might help you remember yourself.
~Marilag