Computers were fun before they were the primary experience in life. The time when cell phones were just becoming popular--when they were flip phones with limited minutes (night time minutes free!), each text cost $0.05 or $0.35 for pictures--that was when coding was fun.

When everyone used jQuery even though it didn't scale and php even though it wasn't secure, they were fundamentally fun and something you could be proud of.

Before design standards, before "user experience engineering", before CSS itself turned into onerous programming.

Before Angular, React, Vue, Bootstrap, Webpack, TypeScript, Vite, and all the other gay things since then.

Before "passing CI pipelines" and code review.

Before containers and Dockerfiles and container vulnerability scanning and 20 critical vulnerabilities that are impossible to exploit but you have to fix them anyway because the security faggot says so because he sees some retarded autogenerated report and knows nothing about what any of it actually means but is charged with annoying you with a false sense of authority.

Before "coding" was marketed toward women, blacks, faggots, etc.

Before CEOs were Indian. Before CEOs wore blue jeans to try to be like the bros and shake that stuffy formality and sense of pride in engineering we once had.

And now computers are just a voluntary prison. Because what if Something Happens while you're away and you're the last to hear? What if someone else is better "informed" (by pervasive propaganda) than you? It would be tragic! Almost as tragic as spending an entire life looking at pixels that never seem to do exactly what you want.