I guess I'm not as far along as the OP is, but I can definitely feel myself getting there. The meaningless Internet bullshit used to be meaningless, but mean a

I guess I'm not as far along as the OP is, but I can definitely feel myself getting there. The meaningless Internet bullshit used to be meaningless, but mean a lot to me; the big news would be a 2% drop in Firefox users or something and everyone would lose their minds. Now, the meaningless Internet bullshit is some site with no vowels and no revenue selling for twenty billion dollars, and it actually means something because twenty billion dollars is a lot of money in the real world; for a sense of perspective, read this [0] and realize that twenty billion dollars could supply all of those things yearly for _a decade_. And yes, I know that 15 years ago there was a bubble too, but it was a lot smaller. In 1999 there was barely north of ten billion total invested in software by VCs. I don't know exactly when it was, but at some point I went from excitedly tracking the latest versions of distros, googling "shareware" and installing whatever I could find, getting wrapped up in flamewars, formatting my hard drive every week (and it was a hard drive, not an SSD; in 2010, the price of a 120gb SSD dropped from $420 to $230.) I think that point was systemd. Six years ago, the initial version was released. That was 2010, and things seemed different. No way I would accept a complex, huge init system on MY carefully tuned $distro_of_the_week. Today? I'm 100% in support of systemd. It makes my life easier. I have zero desire to tweak a complex mess of init scripts. And sure, I run Arch Linux, but that's mostly because it Just Works (tm) and I'm used to Linux. If someone gives me a Windows box, I won't lecture them on how they're contributing to the downfall of humanity, I'll take the damn machine and write the code they're paying me to write. I shudder at the thought of googling "shareware" and just randomly installing programs, and it looks like I'm not the only one; it seems that trend died... yep, around 2010. [1] I no longer give friends USB drives of "cool software", and if they gave me one I'd think it's a strange joke. I no longer read stuff like WinSuperSite; I'm sure Paul Thurrott is still churning out the same quality content as always but I have no interest in reading about the latest features of whatever. [0] https://www.cardonationwizard.com/blog/2011/07/01/unicef-usa-what-can-2-billion-dollars-buy/ https://www.cardonationwizard.com/blog/2011/07/01/unicef-usa... [1] https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=shareware https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=shareware [edit] Turns out WinSuperSite is gone. Or, technically it's there but it's not Paul. "SuperSite Windows is the top online destination for business technology professionals who buy, manage and use technology to drive business"... wow, that's depressing. The old URLs even 404. :(