I hate to "blame this on millennials," but think it might be just that millennial (and gen-X) culture is stuck.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same.
2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly.
3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)
Make sure you have connections with your coworkers you wish to remain connected with (for friendship and/or opportunities).
Make sure you have no personal data saved only on your work computer.
Advocate for open sourcing any small utilities or other code that you have written so that you can have good public code samples.
Make sure that you have non-work access to retirement accounts, paycheck stubs, etc...
Finally, be willing to leave first. (For many) it can be hard to not have your work as part of your identity. Remember that businesses cannot care about you, just people in them.
Cost: $0
Time: ~1 hour
Location: Zoom
Requires: Someone to act as host
Here's something we recently tried that worked fairly well: Story Time. The goal was to share short humorous stories. Exaggerations were encouraged. And topics suggested. To help I (acting as the host) started it off with a story about a car and picking up "new" clothing at 70 mph. Opening up to others for other stories, but specifically encouraging stories about cars or clothing (to help prime the pump).
People tended to thread story topics on their own for the most part, but if things quieted down, I would add in another story, likely shifting the topic around some.
A few stories fell flat, but they are short and for the most part it worked really well. It also helped with one of the parts of "Zoom Happy Hour" that I hate: not knowing who is supposed to be talking and when to join in.
It does require a level of comfort with the team, but at the same time it allowed an enjoyable time for those who just wanted to lurk. It also didn't appear to be limited to those who lean extroverted as some happy hours can even in real life.
I hope this leads to a better non-Google App store. I have to keep Google Play disabled most of the time or it forces my phone to re-enable the Chrome browser each night. I choose to use Firefox on my phone and thus have Chrome disabled (it is not uninstallable without rooting). Google Play however will enable a non-system critical app that I explicitly told the operating system to disable.
I refused to buy Amazon ebooks when I learned that I didn't own them. I only owned a right to read them (dependent on many legal things).
The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book. Considering the resale value of a book is on average about 50% of the original price, the real price of an ebook for the user with this limitation should be ~50% less than the cost of the paper book. (Not taking into account shipping costs, etc...)
This became real to me when my aunt died. She had purchased thousands of dollars worth of ebooks. Had she purchased physical books, those books would have been donated or resold. At a loss to the publisher, but a gain to the original purchaser and secondary purchaser. (or estate in this case).
Unless I as the purchaser am at least partially compensated for this loss of value by a price decrease, I cannot buy ebooks with a resale limitation.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same. 2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly. 3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)