I’m not here to whinge about the sorts of things depressed people do. Yeah, life sucks, and for my generation, we learned that from The Princess Bride.

But a week into this hell, I find myself unable to identify what a light at the end the the tunnel would even look like, and whether there’s any way to distinguish it from a train.

I know many of you have it worse than I do, and I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. My job no longer exists. That’s small potatoes against fearing for your life. But this is one battle too many. I’m using short, declarative sentences.

I called my mom today, and it came up that I have no active plans, but I’d not so much complain about not waking up tomorrow. I’m just exhausted. Things have been going backward for 20-plus years, and we were able to paper over it for about three.

What hope is there? I did a coding bootcamp in 2021 because I had nothing official on my resume, and JS was going to be easy. So. Writing is worthless. Editing is worthless. Fact-checking is worthless. Print design is worthless. Navigating data when it’s not in your job description is worthless. And god forbid you attempt to code without your handlers’ approval.

I don’t see what comes next.

  • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I can write good enough code that I was pushed out by Gannett for threatening everyone at the director level with accurate data that rendered their jobs largely useless. Our CMS was gathering all of the data they wanted; they just didn’t want to pay for API access, which I believe I heard would be $250K atop our contract for access to our own data. So they overstaffed because they wanted to force people to manually report extant data.

    That’s before we even get into what that did to what was left of what we were doing that could charitably be accused of being journalism.

    While I appreciate the offer, I can’t do this anymore. I’m not going to try to get back into the corporate world. It is soulless, has no sustainable future and has already stolen the prime years of my life. I no longer believe in the system. Either I die or I don’t, but never again am I spending 95% of my working hours to pay already rich people. That ship has sailed.