My oldest recently moved out on her own, and my youngest will start high school next year. I’m right on schedule for a midlife crisis.

I haven’t purchased a sports car, and I love my wife more today than I did when we married twenty-five years ago. My midlife crisis has taken the form of complete professional exhaustion. My escapist fantasies of late center around leaving tech to do something—anything—else.

I’ve spent over two decades—my entire work life—in this industry. While my friends in high school worked typical afterschool jobs slinging burgers, I slung HTML at the local internet service provider.

I was fortunate to discover user experience in its infancy. I loved the beautiful, supportive, loving design community that sprang up in the early days of Twitter. I credit that community—with its unrelenting heart and unshakable resolve to make tech serve people when the rest of the industry was so starry-eyed about all things digital that it tended to forget humans exist—with putting me on the path to become a people-centered leader.

Now, between daydreams of opening a funky coffeehouse-slash-bookstore or an off-grid artist colony supported by herds of alpaca, I realize that while I have always loved technology and the unbridled potential it represents, my career has been about people. I have gotten out of bed each morning for two things: coffee, and the chance to make the lives of the people around me a little brighter and lighter. I have spent my career in tech, but I have spent it on people.

Over the last decade, while coffee has been a constant buoy, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to be a leader whose raison d’etre is people. I have been swimming against a dehumanizing and never-ending tide. My arms are tired, and my lungs burn.

Earlier this week, I posted to LinkedIn about my frustration over what I feared was a tectonic shift away from support for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the tech industry. This morning, I read that Meta has shuttered DEI efforts, ended diverse slate hiring practices and representation goals, and eliminated supplier diversity programs.

Why? In an internal memo, Meta’s VP of HR, Janelle Gale, wrote that Meta will “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” which baffingly reads like an argument for DEI. The real reason is clear: “The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”

As vile as I find these actions, Gale is not wrong in the assertion. The legal and policy landscape is shaking in violent and previously unseen ways.

The ethical landscape, however, is unchanged.

The tech industry has always struggled to remember that there is flesh and blood behind bits and bytes. It will continue to do so.

And I’ll still be here. Arms aching, lungs gasping, making things better for people in every way I can. Because people matter.

The alpaca will just have to wait.

Cover photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash