Last year I went on a rant about how modern IT systems and necessary skillsets were eroding at my capacity to deliver my usual jack-of-all-trades ability to provide help.
I was unsure how to progress, going forward.
I felt like I was becoming obsolete.
The exhausting chase
Software as a service, undermines confidence “gained through familiarity” - with its cloud based infrastructure, constantly in development, frequent change meted out as part of a rolling “whats new this month” news cycle to insiders and downstream subscribers.
I feel like I am fundamentally at odds with this new generation of IT products. Morally and ethically.
Nothing is logical, clear, concise, useful.
Everything is another layer of obfuscation and bloated features. Fingers probing deep within your privacy, monitoring and recording your activities to parcel it all back up and present it to you as productivity and wellbeing.
My waning knowledge and understanding of these services, as they morph away from me (yet again), had me well and truly exhausted with the chase, and it was eating away at my self confidence and belief in my competance.
The rewarding allotment
However, I realised my efforts to divine the inner workings and logic of these systems, doesn’t have to be at a fundamentally deep level and I don’t have to agree with their ethical approach to privacy to provide a cursory level of support.
In fact, my real enthusiasm for ‘doing things’ with computer systems had been redirected towards a more wholesome if selfish pursuit.
I was still learning to ‘get things done’, only on a subsistence level, catering for my own computing needs.
The skills of which are attainable, the system of which is under my direct control and the methods by which are wholly ethical and sustainable.
So my real take from this, is that my ‘obsolescence’ in the modern arena, can be countered by my much more enjoyable, vastly more rewarding, exploration into fulfilling my own needs with tailored progressive and ethical solutions.
Grow your own, for you alone
I’m cultivating my own crops in my own fields and NOT stressing over what I can and can’t do, in the perplexingly complex network of sterile corporate warehouses churning out soylent green.