Maya

Working in tech for the past decade, I’ve been thinking about this concept called Maya and how it maps to what I see around me. The tech industry feels like Maya in action. Not sure why this keeps bugging me. This is Maya.

You start as a junior developer, excited about every new library, every framework, convinced you’re building the future. Then you become senior, and you watch the next wave of juniors get excited about… the exact same things. Different names, same energy. React becomes Vue becomes Svelte becomes whatever’s next. Microservices become serverless become edge computing. This is Maya.

Here we are, chasing the next promotion, the next salary bump, the next equity package. But I’ve watched colleagues get everything they thought they wanted, move to better companies, get acquired, even IPO. And then what? They’re still checking Slack at 11 PM, still stressed about deadlines, still looking for the next thing. It never ends. This is Maya.

Tech hubs are particularly good at this illusion. Everyone’s chasing the unicorn exit, the life-changing money. But I know people who made it, who have serious money, and they’re… still working 70-hour weeks at their next startup. Still desiring more. We’ve built golden handcuffs and convinced ourselves they’re freedom. We think we have free will, but try leaving without another offer lined up, try taking a real break, try saying no to the urgent project. This is Maya.

What gets me is how we’ve basically made suffering scalable. Junior developer problems: imposter syndrome, learning curve stress. Senior problems: architectural decisions, team management, oncall rotations. Principal problems: strategy, politics, existential questions about what we’re even building. VP problems: board pressures, quarterly targets, managing managers. Founder problems… honestly, I don’t even know where to start with that level of stress. Investor relations, existential company survival, the weight of everyone’s livelihood. It’s like we’ve engineered a perfect misery ladder. More money, more problems at every level. Anyway. This is Maya.

Even our solutions just feed the cycle. Burned out at your corporate job, everyone says switch to a startup for the energy and equity. Startup grinding you down, go independent, be your own boss. Still miserable, maybe try a bigger company for the stability and benefits. It’s musical chairs but with careers. We keep switching companies, switching roles, thinking the next move will fix whatever’s wrong. This is Maya.

But the problem isn’t the job, the company, or even the industry. It’s the belief that any configuration of external circumstances can give us what we’re actually looking for. We’ve convinced ourselves that if we just find the right role, the right team, the right compensation package, then we’ll finally feel… I don’t know, satisfied? The external stuff never works out the way we think. Because what we’re actually looking for isn’t in the org chart or the pay grade or whatever. It’s something that no amount of reshuffling can touch. This is Maya.

The companies change names, the technologies evolve, but the stage stays the same. New actors playing the same roles. Eventually our careers end, we retire or get laid off, and whether we shipped that killer feature or got that promotion, it all becomes someone else’s legacy. That recognition, that seeing through the pattern? That’s where the real work begins. And this is Maya.

The concept of Maya is too immense and deep to be captured in a short fragmented thought. There have been entire books and literatures devoted to understanding it. I’ve just tried to map it to what I see in the tech industry.

References: The talks on Maya by Swami Vivekananda and Swami Sarvapriyananda.