It would be nice if they start a Great War Against Disease, and spend as many trillions as needed so no one ever gets the flu, any cold, or any other disease ever again.

People keep saying "that's not possible" but there are already a lot of companies working on it.

Show me a place I can make $300,000 working on curing diseases and I'd happily spend my life working on it. At the moment making websites pays better.

There are a few computational drug discovery companies that might suit you. For example, I work at Schrodinger, whose motto is "Fight Disease With Code."

https://www.schrodinger.com/careers

But you're right that you won't get $300k. Even $200k is a reach. Funding for drug discovery can't match making websites yet.

Meaningless jobs will always pay better. If IT jobs in disease eradication paid $300,000, Silicon Valley would be paying $500,000 to keep the bright minds keeping consumerism alive. You have to pay a lot to get people who want to contribute to society to spend their time not contributing to society. cf. Big Tobacco & Oil.

I think it's more that something in the economic system is just mismanaged or broken.

If I could take a pill and get an extra year of healthy life, I would pay a lot for that pill.

If I could take a pill (or vaccine, or whatever) and never get sick again, I would pay a lot for that pill.

If you could make 7.5 billion people never get sick, I assume that would make you far richer than Jeff Bezos.

Surely these solutions and others are worth more than a lot of the other things we buy. But our system isn't set up to develop them, it seems. We're set up to pursue quarterly earnings statements, rather than 10 or 20 year goals that would dramatically improve our lives.

Also, I'm not sure that our current meaningless software jobs are actually completely meaningless. We are actually making tasks easier and faster, which in some way does contribute to society advancing faster and maybe someday being better able to pursue other goals.

Life is significantly different and at least in some ways better thanks to Amazon (get anything anywhere), Google (search everything), Wikipedia (basic knowledge about almost anything), the internet (communicate with anyone), Coursera (learn basic skills on many topics), and so on. And even the simple e-commerce websites for some family business, made by a "web developer" for $500 in 1998, helped push us a little bit toward a more discoverable and efficient economy. Which does help us get a little bit more efficient overall, for goals we might pursue later.

Or at least that's how I convince myself to keep doing what I'm doing.

With 30% unemployment, making websites might not make much money in the near future.

A lot of physicians make $300k right now. But it’s a bigger sacrifice with or without the money.

Coincidentally, 24.9% is about what actual unemployment (total 16-64 munus working 16-64) is when unemployment is reported at 3.9%.