Initially, I started writing this as a different post. The title was going to be "How do you stay motivated to work in tech these days?", because that is the question I have been living inside for months. However, it felt like there was more to it, a bigger version of the same thing, and so I reframed this whole mess for me: how the hell do you keep up with the modern world?

That is the thing sitting underneath the burnout, it is not only that tech got grim, it is that keeping up has quietly become a full-time job stacked on top of the full-time job.

I started working in tech back in 2019. Fast forward to 2026, and I am having the hardest time of my life to stay motivated to work in tech right now. Just seven years of my life were enough to question myself, whether the work I am doing matters anymore. And besides that, I have the feeling of the general need to "keep up" every single day. A few hours reading the latest on new models and state-of-the-art AI, suddenly I need to understand the economy too, I have to stay on top of the startup world and monitor what big companies just shipped, install new apps, play with them, and form an opinion, a few hours designing, coding, and building with AI just to keep a feel for where the tools are (which is a target that moves daily), an hour in the niches of the internet I love, about culture and how people are actually thinking, a few more hours on the books I keep telling myself I have to read, and woven through all of it, the real work, the new company, the thing that is supposed to be the point of all this.

By the end of that, I am so wired by the sheer volume of it that I need an hour just to come down enough to sleep. Holy fuck. How is anyone supposed to keep this up? Especially next to a social and outdoor life?

The tech version of the treadmill is faster

Every field has its firehose now. But in tech the water pressure is something else. The unspoken rule is that standing still means falling behind, so you never stop moving. And lately the only thing that seems to matter is cramming in as much AI as humanly possible. Your productivity gets measured by the number of tokens you burn through in a day, as if thinking in public and burning compute were the same thing.

When I started, the work felt like pioneering. Now a lot of it feels like sprinting on a treadmill someone keeps setting faster, just to stay in the same place.

And then there's the part that actually keeps me up

If it were only exhausting, I could live with exhausting. But there is a moral weight stacked on top of the tiredness, and that is the part I can not put down.

I am burning tokens and money to keep up with tools that are, in a very real sense, part of the problem. Green areas get paved over for yet another data center. The energy those data centers need is so heavy that companies quietly slide back toward oil and gas to meet it. Meanwhile there are security breaches in the very AI tools everyone is racing to adopt. The planet is burning while we are burning tokens, and I am somewhere in the middle of that sentence.

What makes it worse is how little of it is in my hands. I want to contribute to a better world – I think most people quietly do – but almost all of the levers that matter are held by industries so large that my choices feel like a rounding error. That powerlessness is its own kind of tired. It curdles into frustration, and frustration is greedy. Given the chance, it will take over everything.

And here is the quiet, slightly embarrassing truth underneath all of it: all I ever really wanted was to enjoy life. Not to win the news cycle. Not to have a take on every model. Just to do work I find meaningful, and to enjoy the time around it.

Maybe the question is wrong

Here is what I keep circling back to. Both of my questions – how do I stay motivated in tech and how do I keep up with the modern world – smuggle in the same assumption. That I have to keep up. That consuming the entire firehose is the baseline, and anything less is failure.

But who decided that? Keeping up is not the same thing as living. You can not drink the whole firehose and also have a life, and pretending you can is, I think, the actual source of the exhaustion. Not the world moving fast. The belief that I am obligated to move exactly as fast as it does, in every direction at once.

I do not think the answer is to log off and pretend none of it is happening. The grim stuff is real, and I am not going to insult you by pretending it is not. But refusing to let it become the whole story is a choice I can actually make. So is picking my corner and letting the rest be someone else's job. So is choosing depth over coverage. So is giving myself permission to not know everything – to miss three models, skip the discourse, and be genuinely fine.

Because there is another story running alongside the grim one, and it is just quieter. The small, well-made app built by two people who actually give a damn. The writer publishing something strange and personal on their own domain instead of a platform. The tools that still feel like they were made by humans, for humans. That story does not trend. You have to go looking for it. But it is there, and pointing you toward it is a much better reason to keep writing than outrage ever was.

The part where I have to be careful

There is a trap hiding inside everything I just said, and I want to name it before I fall into it. "Pick your corner and let the rest be someone else's job" can turn into "wall yourself off and call it peace." And that is a different thing entirely.

Marco Arment wrote something recently that caught me exactly where I was heading. He had taken a break from his online tech community on Mastodon – stepped back from the feeds, the people, the noise – and at first it was a relief. But the kind of relief that a vacation gives you. After a while he noticed the quiet had a cost: fewer new ideas reaching him, the quality and reach of his work slipping, his skills improving more slowly, his world getting smaller. The isolation he had framed as principled was mostly just making him worse at the things he loved.

That landed, because it names the exact distinction I had been blurring. There is the firehose – the obligation, the treadmill, the token-counting, the anger-as-content – and you can walk away from that with a clean conscience. And then there is community: your people, the actual exchange of ideas, the challenge that sharpens your work and that you simply can not generate alone in a room. Quitting the first is self-preservation. Quitting the second is just a slower, lonelier version of the same burnout.

And the human writing I keep saying we need more of? The indie blogs, the people publishing something real on their own corners of the internet? That is community. You do not get to love it from a distance and also refuse to participate in it. If I want more of that world to exist, the price of admission is showing up in it, not just curating it from behind a wall.

So the goal was never to disappear. It is to engage on terms that do not wreck me – to stay in the room with my people while opting out of the race.

So how do you keep up with the modern world? Honestly, I do not think you do – not all of it, not the way the treadmill wants you to. You pick the corner of it you actually love, you go deep there, and you let the rest of the firehose be someone else's job. You stay close to your people and let the firehose run without you. You protect enough attention and enough calm to notice the good stuff when it shows up. And you remember, on the days the frustration tries to take the wheel, that keeping up was never the point.

Enjoying life was.