You Have to Feel It

The corporate machine does not feel it.

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.

In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?

Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.

Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.

Perhaps that was just the magic of Jobs, who definitely felt things. But he didn't make the iPhone single handedly.

The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.

Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.

Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.

A perfect example is the terrible mismanagement of the epidemic in the USA; over a million people dead, many (most?) of them unnecessarily for the active rejection of basic infection control measures. A perfect example of the corruption of which you speak: many countries got €1-2 rapid tests (I bought a 50 pack) where the US only approved the $30 two-pack. Thousands died unnecessarily so the state could funnel money to their buddies.

This is just one of a million examples. The rate of degeneration seems to be increasing further.

You’re right about it getting close, but unfortunately “almost over” in this context usually means a generation or two. Children born today might only know a lifetime of suffering only for their own adult children to finally emerge in the spring.

This is why I don’t like takes like this. It is impossible to be in good cheer when there will be millions of preventable and utterly unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of lives and bodies damaged and stunted irreparably due to lack of access to medicine and education and equal protection of law. Preventable diseases not being prevented, treatable conditions going intreated. Forced and unnecessary poverty costs lives. It is no different than any other genocide or intentional mass murder.

If there's a genocide level event it won't have my endorsement, I'm still mourning a kid brother who would still be here if it weren't for a lot of the factors killing men his age in stupendous numbers. That genocide? It's been happening for a minimum of 5 years, more like ten.

I appreciate the merits and gravity of your complaint (to put it mildly) but mine is the wrong complaint box for it.

Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.

I found the idea fascinating, but it was too clunky and heavy for the features it offered. I think the concept was too far ahead of its time, it couldn’t be implemented well in available tech.

> Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There's nothing remotely cheerful about how bad it's going to have to get first before it gets better. The fact that a genocide eventually ends is not a reason to be happy about being in the beginning of a huge one.

If I won 100M, I wouldn't work the exact same job - I'd probably move into an adjacent role that was more ambitious and took on a lot more risk, because I would be a lot less concerned if the company I was working for crashed and burned. The outlines of my role would stay the same.

I feel I've been clear-headed about my feelings about work. It took a lot of thinking to get to a place I enjoy. I haven't always enjoyed my work; I've worked at places that I hated and places that were just meh. But yeah, my current work is awesome, I happily do it nights and weekends just for fun (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend). Most people I work with, and most friends I have outside of work, feel similarly. I'm sorry you don't feel the same, but I encourage you to think before telling other people they feel a different way than they actually do.

I agree, but I don't think it would have been as polished as the iPhone out of the gate.

> Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.

As a sibling comment mentioned, I think the Newton was perhaps better than you're giving it credit for, but my point isn't that Apple makes great products, it's that it's possible at certain times for certain teams within large companies to "feel it".

Perhaps entertainment could be another example. Do you think the team that made Wall-E didn't "feel it"? What about Zelda Breath of the Wild?

I think people are forgetting how extremely unpolished the iPhone was out of the gate. No app store. Even something as fundamental as copy/paste took until years later.

I couldn't bear to pour all my energy in something that, ultimately, is not mine. But I could feel your enthusiasm through your post, which made me a bit jealouse.

So, yeah.