When Passion Becomes Commodity

The article describes how building once felt playful and absorbing, but in tech it has been turned into something measured through output, productivity, and revenue. It links that shift to burnout, apathy, and the pressure to treat every skill as something that must be monetized.

Reading notes

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• The author recalls early making as joyful experimentation, with late-night repairs, soldering, coding, and the satisfaction of getting something useful to work.
• That same passion and hyperfocus are described as something managers and executives exploit, especially when they reduce people to lines of code, earned value, and performance metrics.
• Therapy helped the author understand the role of emotional neglect, rigid productivity culture, and neurodivergence in repeated burnout.
• The article presents the current tech system as one that extracts value from labor, sidelines accessibility and meaningful work, and pushes people to focus on quarterly goals, retention, and investor approval.
• The author says they want to make things for real people with real problems, including tools that are shared fairly or freely instead of justified by profit.
• The piece argues for building outside corporate control through side projects, open-source work, repair spaces, and community help.
• It ends by framing making as resistance and by calling for a return to collective power, curiosity, and building for one another instead of for profit.