Read more, improve my cooking skills, learn how to play chess, try out a month-long vacation, play video games, learn some art skills, exercise... I'm sure I'm missing some things. I can do a little bit of these a small amount of the time but it's not enough to enjoy, as long as I'm working.

Maybe there are jobs I'd enjoy but I kind of doubt it. I haven't found a job that I'd say I want to do until I'm in my 60s, that's for sure.

The problem is that meaning is undefined and this leads you down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is the meaning of life, which will make you very disappointed and lead to constructing a psychological bubble of "beliefs" that you appoint as facts to find a way out of this burdensome brooding.

Not everyone wants to live a lie like that, and have that sort of pseudo religious lifestyle. It's much easier to just go for the highest paying job, then making sure to also do some good (if you feel like it's too "evil"), by for example donating some of your salary, or doing some volunteer work. Why is this better? Because it's clear practical actionable goals that you can rely on, and that you know will have the desired outcome.

But it's more work to do this, assigning some superficial "meaning" to your job that you demand of all people around to validate and support, it's a way to be more lazy, to turn your social circle into a mini-cult where you all tell each other that you really can have the cake and eat it too.

To be honest, this reads to me like "I haven't found meaning in life, therefore people who say they have are lying to themselves." You're free to believe what you want, and if that's what makes you happy more power to you, but don't assume your experience is universal. I assure you it isn't.

Only a few people can win that lottery. Then again, I suppose finding work that is personally satisfying and pays well enough is also like winning a lottery.

But do they find it in tech? I could understand if we were talking about doctors, firemen, artists, etc. But tech work is mostly just companies trying to push products. This isn't really evil or good, it's just economics. A lot of tech companies seem to attempt to adopt language which suggests they're doing good, but I couldn't name very many which do something other than push products. I can't remember what language they used years ago when I worked at the apple store, but it was something like "enriching lives." And a lot of the employees seemed to really believe it. Yes, if you just buy a mac rather than some other computer, your life will be "enriched."

I'm not trying to be cynical; I definitely think there are some tech companies which do objective good, but these companies are in the vast minority of the tech field. If most people in tech sought "meaning" then the field would suddenly become extremely crowded around the few companies which actually produce good for the world.

I've learned how to fix my own appliances from online videos, stayed connected with friends through email, found stuff to do and avoided getting lost in unfamiliar cities through navigation, unwound with games, discovered new music and shared my music with others. All of that was because of or mediated by software. Could I have done it without, maybe. But I did use software for it, and tech deserves credit for that.

Maybe we need antitrust action just so we can better separate the “good” software companies from the “bad” ones.

But I think that the problem is mostly orthogonal to technology. Monopolistic megacorporations in any area are rife with problems. Look at Walmart, Nestlé, Shell, Comcast, etc.

Tech companies are particularly prone to this because information naturally lends itself to economies of scale, and economies of scale are fundamentally anti-competitive.

But it's the consolidation that's the problem, not the tech itself.

This question is a pet pieve of mine. The number of good answers is endless, and its sad that you would even ask it. Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.

So why wait until retirement to start seeking them?

> Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.

This is a thought-terminating cliche. Slavery is slavery. Working is an arrangement you enter into voluntarily with a series of pros and cons for all participants. Is the CEO if a company a slave? The researcher who finds a cure for a disease a family member died from? A musician in a touring band? An author with a book deal?

It's your life and I respect your choice to live it how you want, but if you have an idea that work is a thing to be suffered for as little as possible until you reach payday and then you retire and your real life starts... you are almost certainly on track for a completely miserable life both before and after your retirement.

Take a look at the kind of people who have the greatest life satisfaction. How many of them went down the FIRE path versus building their entire life in a meaningful way?

And as with such industries or industry scenes where big amounts of money involved, as in Wall Street or Hollywood, people who get into Silicon Valley tend to view things through a purely transactional lens after a while. After all, that’s how these workplaces view them- not as repositories of higher meaning, but as interchange economic producers. Such is the nature of dumb money.

Time is king, and the closest thing we have right now (until a time machine is invented if ever) to banking time is money. More money equates to more time to do whatever it is you want.

Personally, I'd rather find a job I don't hate and interleave enjoyable use of my time throughout my life.