I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.
Background updating is absolutely the future.
Tech companies tend to do tech best.
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.