CONTENT WARNING: depression, anxiety — please consider not reading beyond this point if these topics tend to trigger you in a bad way
Hi! 👋 I am Jo, I also go by Jojo, and I suffer from depression and anxiety. I find myself going through good periods, not-so-good periods, and… bad periods. Some things make me feel depressed, while other things trigger serious bouts of depression. I haven’t quite figured out what does what in what respect, just that nothing is ever black and white, or logical.
By writing about my experiences I am hoping to figure out more about myself and how to navigate my life through depression and anxiety. By sharing some of what I write, I hope to perhaps provide those willing to read with food for thought.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I feel about a 5 today.
Today I used ChatGPT for the first time, and me being ever the hyprocrite: Yes, it helped me out, but also: I feel bad about it.
As much as I felt that I should not judge something without trying it, I was also resistent against even so much as exploring ChatGPT, not least because of the human exploitation that came ahead of its rollout.
I have worked on (developing) AI tools in a professional settings more than once, and each time I did, the project always started with strict rules set out to optimise developing and ‘training’ a tool and minimise any errors or bias being programmed into it, only for people in charge to soon want to move the proverbial goal posts, in order to speed up the overall project, to the detriment of the usability and quality of the final project/service. Then the decisionmakers in charge get to proudly pound their own chests and slap each others’ backs over successful completions and launches, because they themselves are generally speaking the least likely to face the damaging downsides of their decisions to cut corners along the way.
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Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay
Technology seems to matter more than humans do
Developing tools and automation to make people’s job easier and faster? I’m all for it. But my experience has been that technology is less and less appreciated for how it can help people and operate to expand and extend their capabilities, and instead is increasingly implemented to replace or punish people.
When I first worked in a shop, that shop had one or two cameras aimed at products most commonly stolen, which generally served as more of a deterrent for would-be shoplifters than as a tool to catch people.
When I worked in retail environments (shops or otherwise) in recent years, those places had countless cameras, all aimed at people, which generally served to catch out members of staff making honest mistakes and punishing them for it as if they had actively engaged in malice.
One of my first call centre jobs was at the helpdesk for a bank’s electronic banking customers, a predecessor to online banking, involving a computer programme on a floppy disk and dial-up modems that were generally too slow to give you more advanced functionality such as internet access. I remember once having to tell a caller that there was no point in him yelling into his modem, explaining to him that the process of his computer dialing into and exchanging data with the bank was automated, with no human at the other end of his connection to hear his shouts.
(We did have technical colleagues who knew what each modem bleep or buzz or other sound meant, but that is a different topic altogether and not relevant here in this context.)
One of my most recent call centre jobs involved providing customer support via telephone, email, chat and text. I remember once having to explain to a customer via chat that they were not communicating with a bot but with a real human being (me) with actual feelings (and ask them to please mind their language, because their choice of words was rather rude.)
One of my first office jobs was as a temporary payroll assistant. Before the monthly pay run I had to physically walk around the office and warn people to close certain programmes on their PCs and don’t attempt to reopen them until these two huge printers in a separate room had completed printing reams and reams of payslips. This process took several hours and afterwards I could go tell everyone it was safe to open the programme on their PCs again. Sometimes people forgot to wait for that go-ahead and then the payroll administrator and I would have to repeat the entire payrun because you couldn’t just run the part that had failed as a consequence of someone accessing the database again before the run had finished.
I am glad for everyone involved in payroll administration nowadays that technology has moved on from then. But I have been struck by the number of (sometimes big!) organisations who are so reliant on process automations, that they no longer have any people in their payroll department capable of doing single, one-off manual payslips and payouts for those new members of staff who join after the month’s payrun cut-off date, meaning new staff members may go weeks or months before their first proper pay. All because decisionmakers deemed it unnecessary to invest in the people able to do so (either with or without the aid of technology). Again, because they, the decisionmakers, themselves are generally speaking the least likely to face the damaging downsides of their decisions to cut corners along the way.
People in positions of power relying heavily on (rushed!) automation and/or flawed programming, and using it to replace people rather than assist them, is what led to over 700 people getting criminal convictions, essentially because computers said they’d done wrong.
Humans need to care for humans to matter
That particular scandal was so big and deemed so exceptional, decisionmakers in other places and organisations felt safe to ignore it, rather than learn about how flaws and failures in automation could be affecting their businesses and people.
That limited interest (or outright disinterest) is often organisation-wide. People in all layers of organisations, from top-level decisionmakers to front-end users, seem very interested in implementing technological advances in their day-to-day operations because they can then celebrate the investment and/or cost cuts, show off any gadgetry and/or novelty, and boast about it on their CVs/résumés and in conversations. But when it comes to the challenge of learning the actual nitty gritty… only a minority seems truly invested in taking an interest, studying how it works, learning not just how to use it but how to use it well.
I cannot say with certainty why that is but I suspect a lot of people just don’t expect to hang around anywhere for long enough. Because learning something thoroughly takes time, and perhaps most of us expect to move on willingly or be moved on forcefully? Or because we’ve all learned to expect for projects to be aborted and/or technologies to move on before we reach maximum expertise or fluency in using them?
Whatever the reason is… this shallowness of people and systems rules modern workplaces… and I hate it.
Reasons modern-day work life depresses me
Modern-day workplaces depress me in how they judge people on achievements on their CVs/résumés that may look good on them individually but haven’t necessarily benefited the organisations or users/consumers affected.
Modern-day workplaces depress me in how they use technological advances to replace or punish people rather than support them.
Modern-day workplaces depress me because too many people in them depress me. Because they put themselves, money, greed, and technology and before everything and especially everyone else. Which always seems to lead to exploitation.
Modern-day work life is not the cause of the depression and anxiety that have blighted my life for decades now, but they do at times drive my mental health in directions that I am desperate to veer away from. This is why I intend to write more pieces like this, if only to figure out more about myself and how to navigate my life. THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION FOR ONLINE TAKES OR UNSOLICITED ADVICE. No matter how much I (over)share, you do not know me. By the same token, if anything I write appears recognisable or relatable, I hope you don’t hate that, but also please don’t take anything I write about my mental health as guidance or knowledge about your own – I am NOT a mental health professional.
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