There’s a lot here. Some I can comment on and some I can’t. Some bits are simply how you are viewing the world, and differ to how others view it. There is no possibility for objectivity there, and are better suited to discussions with mental health professionals.

For my sins, I’m a Product Manager. While I have a background in engineering (having done a CS degree and taught myself to code in my teens), I have never held a job as a developer.

As such, I have conversations pretty much every day with developers, dev leads, people with “architect” in their title, CTOs, etc, all of whom are considerably more technically literate than I am, about what new technologies we can take advantage of. Some times it’s me asking them, sometimes it’s them asking me, but one thing is always constant. Time, risk, and cost of implementation is what matters most.

The majority of the time, when I am approached by Devs, the conversation goes along the lines of:

• Dev: "there is this awesome new thing we absolutely need to use now"
• Me: "OK, what are the benefits?"
• Dev: "it makes X, Y, and Z so much easier and save us time doing them"
• Me: "OK, how long do we spend doing those things currently?"
• Dev: "eh, well, I don’t know exactly, but it’s, er, it’s loads and doing this will save us that time and it’s great and we need to do it now"
• Me: "yeah, I get that, but how much time do we actually spend on it?"
• repeat forever

In short, the benefits have not been quantified, and the costs ignored.

Other times, the change that is being suggested doesn’t align with the current business need. I’ve had to reject suggestions to refactor systems because we’ve literally been down to the last few pay cheques, and we need to focus on revenue generation. This massively undermines the person making the suggestion, because it shows they are not understanding the actual priority of the business.

And other times still, it can be simply a pipedream. I once had a dev lead stand up and scream at me across a desk because I didn’t agree with him that we immediately rewrite our entire app in Swift, on literally the day Apple released the beta back in 2014, and I had had the gaul to suggest that he needs to come up with a plan to iteratively develop some new, low risk, functionality in the language first, before saying he wants to spend “at least a year” doing a complete overhaul, and nothing else.

This is not to say that developers are idiots or anything. The vast majority of the discussions I have had with all my collegues across my career have been good, thought provoking, and helpful. But that doesn’t mean they always get what they want, and nor does it mean I get what I want. I have definitely rejected work where that was the wrong decision, and I’ve suffered the consequences of it. I’ve also definitely accepted work that ended up being a complete waste of time.

None of us are perfect.

If you are finding that your boss is always rejecting your suggestions, I would suggest you need to consider these things:

• have you quantified the benefits and costs?
• are there competitors who are already doing this thing? If so, who?
• does the suggestion align with the strategy / focus of the business?
• have you identified a small increment / proof of concept / mvp, that takes a few hours, or days, or a sprint, to demonstrate potential value?

If you can explain the potential value, how it helps the business get to where it wants to be faster, and how you can identify unknown unknowns through low cost and quick to develop POCs, then you may be able to get buy in.

If you can’t, or don’t know how, then there are plenty of resources available. A good starting point would be to read The Lean Startup.

It is considerably more likely that the problem is with your skills of persuasion, and writing business cases, rather than all of technology being worthless.

Lastly, regarding discussions with professionals, one bit that did concern me is this

In my therapist’s opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can’t go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I’m seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it’s everywhere.

My experience with therapists, and in discussions with friends who are qualified pshrinks, is that a therapist should never try and convince you of anything. Their job is to structure conversations you are in essence having with yourself. They may repeat your previous statements back to you, in a way that requires you to reconcile potentially conflicting views or opinions. They may even challenge your assertions and get you to explain more thoroughly your views. These processes may well cause you to change your views on things.

But if your therapist is actually trying to convince you of their world view, you need to get a new therapist.