I am also someone who had to leave the SEO world because it is uniquely soul-damaging.

If it helps to drive you to action: This is almost certainly a dead-end line of work. The people who make money off this stuff aren't the ones doing the writing, and SEO chum is one of the most attractive things for them to automate with LLMs. Even third-party providers who are doing this stuff for clients now are going to find it hard when companies start bringing this in-house or moving to CRM/CMS platforms that have it built-in.

Not that there's a whole lot of great jobs out there right now, of course... but you can keep this one while you shop around?

Good luck; I'm pulling for you

From now until you quit you have to add "Help I'm trapped in a SEO factory" somewhere halfway down all your articles

I used to work as a web developer for a retail chain that specialized in African blood diamonds and gaudy shit that was destined for the Cash 4 Gold heap pretty much the second it left the factory. My predecessor had set up one o' them fancy, new-fangled interwebs "e"-"commerce" webzones and immediately quit the company upon realizing that he was in over his head and couldn't do administration duties on a LAMP server and fix all of the weird site content issues that he'd introduced by hacking a shitty third-party Magento theme to pieces.

Cut to about six months later when I came on board and was going through trying to review some of the site's performance and search relevance issues. Somewhere along the line, I found that one of the many, many extensions that Dipshit had installed included a dynamic product catalog filter set that was not only the #1 cause of our ongoing site performance issues by that point, but also returned canonical links in the sitemap generator, and Google had been crawling all of these dynamically-generated result sets based on every single product attribute in the system.

The punch line: many of these attributes returned empty result sets, and the default landing page for an empty result set had a big fucking <h1>WOOPS!</h1> at the top of the page. For several years, if you searched "WOOPS" on Google, that company's e-commerce site was #1.

TL;DR: Semantic SEO is 10,000% bullshit.

Edit: I also want to include that Dipshit had "VOTE RON PAUL" bullshit all over his LinkedIn profile. During Obama's second term.

You should use your powers for good by getting hexbear to the top of all search results.

Maybe you can help the lazy people who stumbled onto this post. What is SEO?

I can definitely identify with the meaningless job that one might feel is doing more harm than good for society. I suspect this can be partially attributed to the mentality of 'find a job, any job is better than being unemployed' -I'm still working through the solution myself but I'm inclined towards thinking that this could be a motivator towards finding work that contributes towards the betterment of society. Now, if only I could find some work like that, that actually contributes to a stronger sense of security like that described by Maslow's hierarchy.

As much as it sucks I am glad whatever money can be extracted this way is going to a comrade instead of some random lib.

Do you work freelance for some sort of online compant? I was doing some remote freelance gig work for AI at places like Outliner and Alignerr, but that's dried up and I'm getting scared about rent.

Wanna tag me in for a bit?

I wasn't in quite the same field, but I dealt with a lot of the same shit you're describing. I quit last year and are trying to get a childcare degree (pedagogy it's called here, not sure if that translates). Thinking it will be a line of work where I get out, do something relatively meaningful for someone else, even if it is hopelessly undervalued and paid here. But with social anxiety, I don't know if that's an option, depends how you feel around kids, I guess.