Wonder days

I've been thinking about IT and how it has changed, for most people I guess it's changed for the better, but for some of us it's just not fun anymore.

IT used to be about inventing, creating, figuring things out, getting excited about new things and going to work was a great adventure. For fun I'd pick up a new language and figure out writing a little app, like the little game I wrote using SCADA, a chess game in C and a bouncing ball app in Delphi, silly little things but they amused me at the time and I felt as though I was learning something. It was hard to imagine not loving your job and feeling so happy that you weren't in one of those 9-5 trapped in the office jobs that afflicted normal office workers. IT was fun and it stimulated the mind. Nowadays we appear to have ended up as drones, plodding in to 9-5 jobs where the software to create does all the work for us, thinking is optional. I have no desire whatsoever to invent little games anymore because it's all wizards and double clicks to add your code to the studio - where's the fun in that? Inventiveness and creativeness are frowned upon as everyone moves towards templates and applications that churn out standardised everything. Mass produced CMS and Web 2.0 sites that all look and feel the same mean that wherever you go you can rest assured that you will know how to navigate without thinking.

I want to be inspired and stimulated by the work thing that takes up > 8 hours of my day. I want to figure things out and create something new. I want to get back to being one of the people at the start of something new, inventing and making the World a better place. It feels as if the wonder of the Internet that my generation created in the 90's has been lost along the way to greed and banality. I used to be addicted to the Internet, I even wrote a book back in the 90's to help people who didn't understand the Internet. I used to sit up all night, getting maybe 1-2 hours sleep a night for years whilst surfing the web, creating websites, learning new fun things to add to websites and checking out what other people were creating. Nowadays I'm bored within 10 minutes because it's all so dull. People posting about eating a pie, or blogging about having a bath, videos of a dog yawning, a twitter to say you're stuck in traffic - where's the originality? Where has all the creativity gone? So much potential down the pan.

I had dreams of people getting ever more creative in a World of art and music and wonder, all triggered by the new connectivity enabled by the Internet. Guess my generation got the best of it and I am so glad to have been there at the beginning, but am also very saddened and feel somewhat bereaved by the loss of those wonder days of IT.

I've gone from addiction to apathy and it doesn't feel great. Though if someone could make Food 2.0 and make me apathetic and disillusioned about eating, my waistline would be forever grateful.