When Passion Becomes Commodity

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from watching something you love transform into something else entirely. For me—and for so many makers I know—that heartbreak centers around what our crafts have become.

I remember when building felt like magic. Late nights spent soldering connections that probably weren’t safe, hot-gluing a salvaged mini solar panel onto a broken Goodwill instant camera, frantically Googling “Arduino basics” and “how to solder without burning yourself” at 2 a.m. The thrill of making something work that had no business working. The satisfaction of watching an LED finally blink. The joy of showing someone a weird little gadget or program that actually solved their problem. That’s what captured my complete attention. That hyperfocus—the ability to lose myself entirely in a problem or project I cared about—brought me so much joy.

But that same intensity, that passion and hyper-fixation that made me good at what I do, became a vector for abuse. Managers and executives measured worth in lines of code and “Earned Value,” as if a human being’s value is something they have to earn from you. As if we’re not comrades working together toward something meaningful, but resources to be measured and optimized. The coldness of it. The cruelty of reducing people to metrics—of treating teammates not as fellow humans deserving of mutual support, but as assets who must justify their existence quarter after quarter.

Now? Now it hurts.

It hurts to watch this passion—this craft that became a career for so many of us—turn into a source of apathy and pain. Not just for me, but for countless others who started with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm, the same belief that we could build things that mattered—whether in code, circuits, or plastic extruded from a 3D printer.

Through years of therapy, I’ve started to see things differently than I did even five or six years ago. I’ve come to understand how broken some parts of the world really are. The complete absence of emotional intelligence in how we’re managed. The lack of empathy for what it means to be human—to need rest, to have value beyond your output. The industrial, subcultural apathy that’s grown worse and worse—a systematic grinding down of the working class through calculated indifference and rigid dogma about “productivity” and “performance.”

I’ve also had to reckon with being neurodivergent in a world built for neurotypical people—and more painfully, realizing that if the world weren’t structured this way, my neurodivergence wouldn’t be such an extra burden. In a truly collaborative environment, my different perspectives and unique viewpoints could be assets. My hyperfocus could be a gift we all benefit from, not a liability to be exploited until I burn out. Instead, the way work is structured takes advantage of those exact traits—pushing us past our limits, ignoring our boundaries, grinding us down until we crash. It’s happened over and over throughout my career, each burnout leaving deeper scars.

Only through therapy—learning about myself, understanding my boundaries and limitations, coming to terms with my neurodivergence—have things slowly started to become more manageable. But it shouldn’t have taken all of that just to survive.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s painful to recognize the patterns, to feel the weight of how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to accept the unacceptable—to push parts of ourselves down deep to survive in our work environments. It traps us in perpetual survival mode, in and outside of work. What I once thought were all my personal failings—therapy helped me understand were symptoms of a collective sickness. We’re all suffering under the same systems, carrying the same wounds, repeating the same scars. Suffering alone, en masse. Collective trauma.

The Grey Machine

What’s been built around us is a system designed to extract value from our labor while draining the life from our work. Like dragons hoarding gold, a handful of executives and shareholders have turned our tools into their profit engines, our communities into their “talent pools,” our passion into their quarterly earnings. But it’s not just the tech oligarchs—it’s the entire corporatist machine that’s infected and now drives the tech industry.

We’ve become cogs in machines that optimize for metrics we don’t believe in—building features we don’t care about, for products that sometimes make the world actively worse. They’ve created a world that’s grey and dull, stripped of the fervor that once defined this space.

The process has become everything: stand-ups, retrospectives, planning sessions, OKRs, velocity tracking. And what’s most frustrating is how much punching down happens while vision, passion, and innovation get sidelined for whatever new angle will please investors and stakeholders. People so disconnected from normal life—so removed from the working class—that they have no touch with our reality. Our interests aren’t in their minds or their hearts. They couldn’t be. They don’t live in the same world we do.

We’re asked to be passionate about quarterly goals and engagement metrics and user retention rates. Told to get excited about A/B testing button colors while the fundamental problems—the ones that keep regular people up at night—go unsolved because they don’t fit neatly into a revenue model that enriches people who are already incomprehensibly wealthy. Then as a trickle-down effect, things like ADA compliance or language translations—accessibility as a whole—are frequently pushed aside or buried deep in the “agile backlog.”

And if we dare to build something just because it should exist? If we spend time on a project that helps people but doesn’t generate income? Conformity is weaponized to tell us we’re wasting our time. That we should “monetize” it. Turn it into a side hustle. Find the business model. Because under this system, if you’re not extracting value from your passion, then it’s a "waste of time, space, and energy". If your hobby doesn’t have a revenue stream, it’s considered pointless—never mind that it might help dozens or hundreds of people, make someone’s day a little easier, or simply exist because it matters.

What I Actually Want

I just want to be curious again.

I want to make things that people love—real people, not “users” or “cohorts” or “segments.” People with actual problems that need solving. Working-class folks trying to manage their budgets, parents coordinating family schedules, small business owners drowning in admin tasks they can’t afford to automate because the only solutions are designed for enterprise contracts.

I want to help solve problems that make life easier, more enjoyable, more manageable. I want to scratch my own itch and build the tools I wish existed—whether that’s a web app, a physical device held together with hot glue and hope, or a 3D-printed bracket that finally makes something work the way it should. I want to take old, broken, barely functional systems and breathe new life into them—refactor, rewrite, modernize, repair them until they work the way they always should have.

I want to share these things fairly—or better yet, freely—in ways that make sure everyone is taken care of. To put them into the world without needing to justify their existence with a profit margin. To contribute to the commons instead of enclosing it. But we’ve been socially conditioned to feel guilty about this—to feel “irresponsible” if we’re not leveraging every skill into income, turning every passion into profit.

I want to be a maker again—not a soulless cog generating value for people who see me as disposable.

What We’re Up Against

The answer isn’t to accept what the corporate world has become. The tech industry—like so many before it—has been captured by a class of people who create nothing but own everything. They’ve taken the tools we built, the communities we fostered, the open-source spirit that made all of this possible, and they’ve enclosed it, monetized it, and sold it back to us as a service.

But we can build things outside their control. We can create for the love of creating, solve problems because they need solving, help people because it feels good to help people—and because those people are us. They’re our neighbors, our families, our communities.

Yes, most of us need day jobs. We have bills to pay and families to support. The system is designed to keep us too tired, too busy, too afraid of losing our health insurance to rock the boat. But that doesn’t mean we have to let it consume everything we are.

The nights and weekends are still ours. The side projects, the open-source contributions, the repair cafes, the makerspaces, the little tools and fixes we build just because they should exist—those are still ours. But it shouldn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be. It could be better. It should be better. It needs to be better.

The curiosity that brought us here in the first place? It’s still there, buried under layers of sprint planning and technical debt and existential exhaustion—but it’s there.

We’ve been taught to see unpaid work as wasted work. That if we’re fixing someone’s laptop for free, teaching a kid to code without charging, or building a tool that solves a community problem without a subscription model, we’re suckers. But that’s the lie they need us to believe. Because the moment we start building for each other instead of for profit, we remember how much power we actually have. We remember that making things for the benefit of our fellow humans isn’t pointless—it’s the entire point.

And when we build together—when we share knowledge freely, when we refuse to let our work serve only the enrichment of people who already have more than they could spend in ten lifetimes—that’s when we remember what this was supposed to be about.

Finding the Way Back

I don’t have a neat solution to offer. I’m still figuring this out—still trying to reconnect with the part of me that used to combine random components just to see what I could make, that learned to code because I wanted to automate something annoying me, that believed technology could be a force for genuine good.

But I know I’m not alone. I see it in exhausted faces on Zoom calls, hear it in bitter jokes at virtual happy hours, read it between the lines of resignation letters and “moving on to new opportunities” LinkedIn posts. I see it in abandoned 3D printers gathering dust, Arduino kits unopened, side projects that never got past the planning stage because we’re too drained from making someone else rich—and guilted into thinking that’s the only acceptable way to live.

I became a maker—we became makers—because we wanted to build, to tinker, to fix, to create. Somewhere along the way, a system was built around us that tried to make us forget that. That tried to convince us our value was in our productivity, our “impact,” our ability to ship features that increase engagement.

But we’re not just workers. We’re makers. And making is an act of resistance when the alternative is to only build what serves power.

Maybe it’s time to reclaim not just our craft, but our collective power as people who actually know how to build things. The executives and shareholders need us infinitely more than we need them. Every line of code, every circuit, every design, every solution—we made that. Not them.

The simple, profound joy of making something that didn’t exist before—something that helps, something that matters, something that makes life a little easier for someone who isn’t already winning—that’s not just nostalgia. It’s a reminder of what’s possible when we build for each other instead of for profit.

I miss being a maker. And I think it’s time we all figure out how to be makers again—together.

What about you? How does this topic make you feel? Do you remember why you started? Any advice or tips you’d share with the community?