I’m near my 40s, and have been working as software dev since finishing my masters. Few years back I started to go in the direction of more management less dev in a previous company. Saw it wasn’t for me and went to work somewhere else working as a simpler dev role. A few years after and I’m starting to feel the need to change further even. I do love coding but the whole layer of tech debt and management and meetings is wearing me out and has made me lose my love for tech. I am just lost as to what I’d do instead. Cannot work on retail with my autistic ass and since WFH was allowed and accepted I am not planning to go back to an office anyway. Maybe woodworker or something would be enjoyable for me, but there’s other constraints that won’t allow me to change right now, lots of bills to pay and my wife is an entrepreneur so we can’t really risk losing my stable position right now, with two small kids. Once they grow and get out of the house we’d likely move more country side, get some chicken to care for (we love animals) or something like that and maybe I can get space to do some wood work or whatever come to mind then.
So overall, no, you are not losing it, or maybe we are all losing it together. Same with depression, it’s such a tough shit to leave behind. I’m still fighting with it but doing better lately, the job doesn’t help at all…
There’s two points of consideration here, let’s see if I can make my point without a wall of text, I’m prone to those…
Anonimity: the fact that where you connect cannot know who exactly you are. This should be straightforward, anonimity should not be taken away, it is a core part of the internet in my opinion. It’s extremely important that we can express ourselves freely without fear of being persecuted. Despite the negative sides that it has, as those with ill intent will be harder to find (but not impossible). In this the common quote attributed to Franklin applies well in my opinion: Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Proof of personhood: basically the difficult task of making sure that the other end of an internet connection has a real person, and together with that, proof that it is different than others, the ability to know you are you and not someone else.
This is incredibly interesting as a technical problem to be solved, and I do agree with you that the internet as we know it is at risk if we don’t solve it properly. It is specially hard to solve if you try to guarantee anonimity (like I believe it should be).
The wikipedia has an article about it that I think gives a good idea about the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood
Personally I have been quite carefully interested into the whole World ID solution, using a device called orb with open specifications that captures some data from your iris that should be unique per person, storing only an encrypted piece of information in a blockchain and on your device locally so that you can use it to identify yourself as a real unique person and only once, but wherever you use it, cannot know anything about you except that. There’s a lot of possible criticism to such a system, but insofar as I have checked and can understand, it seems like a legit solution. But I leave here the link for anyone interested enough to check it themselves: https://world.org/world-id