I lost my job at the beginning of summer and since then, I've applied to maybe 3 jobs. I've had the feeling for years that whichever next job comes along, it'll probably be the last. So far I've been wrong, but now there's this feeling that even if I landed a new one, it's going to just be kowtowing to another super AI pilled narcissistic CTO pushing arbitrary product and arbitrary hot tech to solve it. Even if writing the code wasn't the last thing I was clinging to, the best it would go towards is... just bullshit. That may be burnout speaking, but I've received at least one invitation to apply to something like this, requiring that I be "all in on ai", and I just can't summon the energy to grind through another inane 5 step interview process to basically spend my days making throwaway crap while someone watches how many tokens I'm using. It's hard to reason about what the outcome I'd hope for is, and for now I'd rather just pay from savings to not bother.
That said, I have no idea what else to do. Going back to school and attempting a degree program seems like kind of a crapshoot even if I could convince myself I'd succeed. All of that is very depressing, but on the other hand I'm actually quite happy to have spent all summer basically doing whatever the hell I want; wasn't that the promise of AI anyway?