Believe

“The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems,” write Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski in this piece for Dissent. What stands out to me is what a break that is from the not-so-distant past, when people flocked to work at tech companies in part because of a genuine belief that they’d be doing some good in the world. Whether or not that was a reasonable belief back then, it’s become harder to sustain in the years since. I think it’s an often unremarked-upon aspect to the broader problem of burnout in the industry: it’s hard to stay committed to doing work you don’t believe is doing good (or, worse, if you worry it’s doing harm). And there’s a lesson there: if you’re trying to address the problem of burnout (whether in yourself, or in your peers), you’ve got to consider that it isn’t only the amount of work or the pressure, but also whether people believe in the work at all.