What you’re saying is undeniably true. At the same time when one considers high-tech as practiced by Silicon Valley and Seattle big tech companies and startups, it’s easy to see how people could become cynical towards work. Cultish company cultures, dishonest pontificating business leaders, market forces that incentivize disloyalty, undergirded by some truly unaffordable housing costs- it’s easy to see how people can get burned out by false promises of work, at least in this industry. It doesn’t help that tech is particularly preachy in its delusions of morality, unlike say, the financial industry.

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.