I entered the tech industry about the same time as you, worked my way up to Infrastructure Team, been unemployed starting off with the great layoffs of 2022 in biopharma (which weren't really picked up by news but occurred following workforce reduction activities from a flurry of mergers in the industry).
These are important questions to be asking for anyone that cares about the future, and it begs the question where we are going, and how will our children survive.
If you have the appropriate foundations in critical thinking (classical trivium curricula) and think about this deeply for a time, you'll realize some unpleasant truths, and some perspectives that you may have been blind to your entire life because of structured indoctrination.
Here are some of the insights I've found:
Those who choose to go without siring children have no future, and their decision-making subtly reflects this in the incentives they follow.
Evil people, are those people who have willfully blinded themselves through choice, to the consequences of the evil acts they commit and they repeat such acts without resistance unless stopped. Evil acts being any act that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others, a definition which is somewhat objectively measurable.
Many people have been induced through structure and organization into becoming evil, and this has been done through a strategic separation of objectionable concerns.
This is a strategy used by both the Nazi's and Stasi, and its used fairly broadly. The complacent fuel the radical evil. The individual who materially supports an organization through work or otherwise, is equally responsible for the same misdeeds of bad actors within that organization, whether they know about it or not.
> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia, making the very few even more wealthy and powerful while dooming the rest.
This observation is partially misplaced. People are only blindly following the short-term incentives driven by money-printing, and steeped in survivor bias.
There is a lot of historical material by great thinkers on how society actually works and was built historically, but you have to go back to some pretty ancient books if you weren't taught it in your education. This generally speaking falls under Social Contract Theory, and Political Economy.
You are incorrect because you imply that the wealthy and powerful will survive the dynamics they are creating. That is quite unlikely for the same reason that perceptual blindness can be malignant. These people couldn't survive without the masses. If you can't see something you can't react, and when you cannot react you cannot adapt and then fail Darwin's fitness and die off. Malthus/Catton have a lot to say about how this would go do.
> What is one to do in this scenario? Is anyone else struggling with this.
Anyone with a brain is struggling with this.
The general consensus in my group, is that once a point of no return is reached, and in all likelihood we've already reached it given lagging indicators and lack of visibility, then the only thing one can do is withdraw the only thing of value they have and focus on efforts that will help them and their group survive which would involve building your own independent grid/community.
The likelihood of socio-economic collapse increases as money printing nears the 3rd stage of ponzi; where debt growth exceeds productive capacity and outflows exceed inflows. Chaos increases, shortage sustains eventually spreading to famine.
That third stage is usually when monetary properties of money break down, along with society, and its rule of law; at least historically.
You'll need to have the skills to defend yourself, make your own things, and be ruthless towards your own survival and the survival of others you care for.
I emphasize group because the lone wolf dies and is snuffed out easily by groups. You need community to survive, and you need to know how to make and produce what you need without modern supply chains.
Centralized hierarchies above a certain population fail to unavoidable dynamics given sufficient time, where they drag every member down with them.
Mises from the Austrian School of Economics covers this in his collected works on Socialism. The failures are indirect, but inevitably occur, and the intractable problems he describes cannot be solved.
The intelligent and competent withdraw to areas they can control when the environment becomes disadvantaged. This has already started happening in migrations from disrupted business sectors to other sectors. If the disruption spreads, you'll see a general withdrawal from society as a whole. Atlas will shrug. Violence always occurs when the rule of law fails. The primary purpose of a rule of law which has required components that have been broken, is non-violent conflict resolution.
If these things are new to you, I'd suggest you start off with Thomas Paine's Right's of Man, and then check out material introducing Austrian economics. It is fundamental education that will change your entire perspective and by extension life.
A long dark is coming, and the many alive today have been forcibly unprepared by past generations through the withholding of a proper first-principled education. That generation instead chose to replace it with torture furthering control and indoctrination.
If you are not familiar with what constitutes torture, and you'd be surprised because its everywhere today.
Torture is the imposition psychological stress. There are specific elements, structuring, and clustering designed for the purpose of thought reform, control through involuntary hypnotism, reduction of rational thought, or to the point of psychological break (disassociation/psychosis).
Isolation is one such element. (established authors on that subject matter include Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo circa 1950s).
Totalism based cultures die out. Protean-ism based cultures often survive.