Why I'm sick of technology

I've been increasingly annoyed in my day-to-day with technology over the past few months. Mostly in the context of apps and websites both on mobile and desktop.

Maybe the pandemic has made me depend on tech more for entertainment and escapism. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe I'm more tuned in to bad design patterns as a front-end developer. I dunno. What I do know is that I'm not the only one dealing with these problems, and it feels like these annoyances have accelerated recently. I sat down for just 10 minutes and tried to dump out everything I could think of from just the past month or so that I've realized is just obnoxious.

The sad thing is that we've gotten so used to how things are that we've just accepted it as normal. But somewhere along the way, I just hit one too many X-buttons on a popup asking for my email for a newsletter, and I got triggered real bad. So, here's my annotated list of just ten or so minutes of thinking about bad experiences we have to deal with in today's tech landscape.

Things that I'm tired of:

Root Cause

As far as I can tell, the root cause is money. Virtually everything I've listed can be tracked back to companies seeking to endlessly increase their income. Most of these issues come down to one of a handful of things:

I don't think any of this is unreasonable given the scenario we find ourselves in. Companies first and foremost want to make money, that is how the world works. But the result is that these devices that are supposed to be tools that make our life easier instead become these obnoxious money pits.

A Plea

So please, if you are a developer, product manager or even investor: we need to make a concerted effort to actually improve quality of life, not add new venues to deliver a death by 1,000 cuts.

And if you're a user of tech (which, if you're reading this, you are): I hope you have identified a few annoyances of your own. Take a moment and report those to the app developers. Maybe even uninstall a few apps and alert the developers as to why.

Users deserve a better UX. Even in my experience with companies whose entire branding is based on UX (such as Apple), I'm hitting these obnoxious problems.

And if I have to install one more damn parking app, I'm going to lose my mind.

~Michael