I will preface this with a disclaimer: This post is a rant I needed to make, to get it out of my system and hopefully find I wasn't alone in this feeling. It is sincere, but it is also a product of profound privilege. The fact that this is my biggest problem is rather an indictment of what little serious problems I have at the end of the day. So this will be tiring to read for anyone subject to real marginalization, or even really anyone who's a real adult and too busy to wax philosophical about nonsense, and I sincerely apologize for that. This is not meant to critique everyone who works in technology, especially the vast numbers of people for whom it's a way to climb the economic ladder in ways that are becoming increasingly inaccessible.

I've just recently entered college, and I'm finally fully trying to lay out a path before me to decide what precisely I want to do with my life. But I'm finding a problem, and it seems a rather serious one to me, at least with what perspective I have.

I feel as though I'm cursed with the capability and heartfelt desire to work on technology amid a world that has been in many ways made infinitely worse by people like me. I feel truly passionate about many things, in the way that young people do, I suppose, and I want to believe that technological skill can continue somehow to contribute to those causes, but I know on some level that it is a lie. A hopeless lie that I was sold when I was far too young to discern its nature.

I was lied to by people who believed that they could change the world for the better through inserting technology where it simply didn't belong, and call it disruption. By people who, in many cases sincerely, believed that freezing code into law, both in the literal sense or within large complex automation-ridden systems; with the notion that code was somehow inherently dispassionate, could subtract human error from systems susceptible to it; without realizing that they were simply codifying the existing systemic biases of our world in ways that made them even harder to correct.

Given the sheer amount of systemic injustices I benefit from - economic inequality, patriarchy, heteronormativity, elitism, racism, ableism and countless others that I will never come close to being able to truly acknowledge - I should be trying to find any way I can to pay back what I took and will continue to take for the rest of my life from society. But in truth, I have spent so long basing my very identity on this deified idea - this lie - of the "tech industry", building my skills, and dreams, and sometimes I feel my very neurological pathways on it, that I feel lost. Now I feel, with some newly gained perspectives, that my dreams are not merely worthless but in many very real ways, actively evil. And I'm not sure how to fix that.