Technology as a means to humanity

“Please enter your goals”

Twice a year at Mozilla I’m asked to enter my goals for the next six months. On principle, that involves thinking about what I want to accomplish and where I want my career to head.

The format for formulating these goals is to take a look at the company’s mission and vision as a whole, examine my org’s objectives and key results (OKRs), and map my goals to the bigger picture. For reference, these were my goals for the first half of 2024:

My H1 2024 Goals

You’ll notice the percentage bars - the idea being that, through the passage of time, we can quantify our progress on these lofty ambitions (when in doubt, just slide it to 100 😉).

“Start with a personal painpoint”

In the startup world, a lot of people stick by this guiding principle for successful innovation: start with a personal painpoint.

My painpoint is that the world of technology I’ve built around myself has started to feel pretty lonely. I spend a lot of time shouting into a void. Building things I think might be useful, only to find they’ve either been done or are met with an inconclusive ambivalence. I have a feeling I’m not alone.

In a survey of nearly 30,000 developers by Stack Overflow, only 20% report being happy at work. And out of nearly 55,000 people, only 12% said they don’t code outside of work.

Only 20% of developers report being happy in a recent Stack Overflow survey

For most of my career, that’s been my story too. As a middling coder, I’m constantly trying to read up and practice to stay relevant. To prove to myself that I was successful in this, I spent a lot of time blasting my progress out to all corners of the internet. I wanted to feel seen.

In a 2021 McKinsey Study, when business execs were asked why employees were quitting their firms, the executives said it was to make more money elsewhere. But when researchers asked the employees why they quit, the most common answer was that they didn’t feel recognized.

My social media strategy worked for awhile to make me feel seen, but at some point it really started to backfire. I felt lonely. Confused about where to focus my attention, and what to contribute. The internet these days is really crowded.

So, a bit reluctantly, and in seeming defeat, I resorted to something I’d never done. I started shutting the laptop at the end of the day, leaving it in the office, and turning my attention elsewhere - I took walks outside, I popped by friends’ houses unannounced, I joined community organizations.

Turns out that, while it takes a bit more effort than opening an app or typing in a URL, getting away from the places where millions of people congregate - (Instagram, X, Slack, Discord…), has helped me feel more seen. And this has made a huge difference in my stress levels, my mental health, and my feeling of self worth. I want that for anyone who’s been feeling the same way I was.

“How might we…”

So here’s an attempt at the old “How Might We” (HMW):

“How might we leverage people’s connection with technology to facilitate more time connecting with each other in the real world?”

I see two key pillars that make this possible: Presence and Recognition

Recognition

In his Humanist Manifesto, David Brooks notes

“In a healthy society, everybody is recognized to some degree. In an unhealthy society, recognition is doled out to the few…as though there were not enough of this precious substance to go around.”

We all want to be acknowledged for the things that make us unique. Being seen, and seeing, creates bonds. Bonds create shared stories, customs and traditions. Through this we build an understanding of and an empathy for one other. And this, carried out over the course of tme, help us answer the hard, enduring, and meaningful questions, that are impossible to answer alone.

But we don’t need a high like count or a thousand followers to feel recognized. We just need witness - the opportunity, ability, and willingness to genuinely see and be seen by others. That’s difficult to do in a crowded room. It requires the other pillar.

Presence

You’ve no doubt read volumes about our culture’s increasing sense of distraction, demands on productivity, lack of work life balance. Thomas Klaffke writes that “society today frames productivity in a way that only sees ‘doing’ and excludes ‘being’ - where downtime becomes negative space to fill rather than a moment to rest and reflect.

Technology is great at filling negative space. When life around you is not bustling, technology provides a portal to somewhere else that is bustling. And it’s so full of shiny objects, all algorithmically curated to cater to you and keep you occupied.

But being occupied is not the same as being present. Presence requires stillness, and a rested, open mind, and a curiosity about others. Poet David Whyte calls this witness:

“the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another… sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

How can we flip the paradigm of technology such that it frees us up to be present instead of filling our empty space? Such that it brings us closer together instead of further apart?