There is not an equivalent 1st amendment “right” to spend our time and money as we will. Too many people just spout an opinion on what we should be “allowed” to do: without thinking of how that could be used against them.
It drives me crazy how willing so many people are to decide what is best for others: the rich, the poor, the disabled, the foreign. And how little insight people have that their own choices are definitely pure waste in the eyes of others.
When did liberty get debased?
It's why it's much easier to walk around a city and spot an empty balcony, high up in the sunset, than to appreciate the city itself.
"Someone should be enjoying that balcony! Why is the rich owner somewhere else, and there are thousands of us pedestrians wishing we could spend just a moment up there? Inefficiency!"
is a much more viral thought than being completely overwhelmed by the amount of human effort your eyes are looking at. If we could properly understand it we'd all just be weeping with gratitude and humility all the time, and that wouldn't be productive at all! Being biased towards negative emotion should be assumed to be the default. So liberty didn't have to be devalued - it just hasn't been properly valued yet! Much more optimistic :)
Sorry for long reply!
One underlying cause for complaining about the waste of others is status seeking, of which virtue signalling is a part of.
People don’t have to be reasonable, but your effort is admirable.
I think engineers look at the world with different eyes, as you say. I find our infrastructure systems as profound - and also the beauty of how our interfaces with those systems hide deep complexity. The average person doesn’t see flushing a toilet as amazing technology, nor understand the vast number of lives saved by civil engineering (doctors are window dressing on society).
The scariest part of this line of thinking being so common is that it has happened! We've bench-marked humanity towards productivity before: dosed drinking water with amphetamines instead of fluoride and outlawed art and mandated labor at tank factories. Productivity!
Down that path lies authoritarianism, but more than that: down that path lies mass murder. What could be more productive than removing those who block productivity?
I appreciate your comment but I am always blown away by how kindly people respond to that idea of "unworthy activity", as if its not one of the cruelest ideas a person can possibly have. It's more common here because it's a community of engineers - we work with complex automations all the time - so it's only a natural mistake to see humanity as a complex automation too, and want to engineer it. But I still can't forgive the callousness.