Rui CarmoAnother year gone by, another birthday.
Almost everything has changed in the meantime - I moved from an ailing, besieged telco rife with internal paralysis to one of the biggest tech corporations on the planet (where I’m still trying to figure out the ropes), there’s a Windows machine in my bag, and a lot of the stuff I took for granted is either gone or subtly different.
Looking back, the things I cared about the most in the past year (besides work, which was by far the biggest concern, and not always in a good way) were books, writing and people, in a somewhat haphazard order, heavily dependent on circumstances but which permeates the dozens of unfinished letters and drafts strewn across my notebooks.
I reach for my iPad every morning and every evening to poke at those, catch up on news and read, and every time I wonder if I will ever finish some of those drafts. There’s no real pressure, though, and even though I have mostly stopped writing industry commentary, that doesn’t stop me from writing up quick stubs and lists of points and counter-points as events unfold.
The problem, I think, is that drinking from the firehose of the tech industry is still addictive and thrilling in general, but bad journalism and click baiting is so rampant these days that writing about the technology industry has become an exercise in diminishing returns.
It’s a lot more interesting, for instance, to correspond with people who are setting up their own businesses (something I’ve been considering for a while, but which never quite clicked for me), or discuss specific topics with a few people now and then.
Writing (and caring about doing things right by people) is still an inextricable part of who I am, and I’m pretty sure by now that it’s what has brought me the most happiness overall.