I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing.

Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.