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Comment by whorleater | Hacker News Reader

I work at a midstage well funded startup where I'm paid well, treated nicely by my coworkers, have a great work life balance, and a clear career path for advancement.

But we do the typical tech wankery bullshit, and the banality of it eats away at you. Maybe the goal is to get accustomed to this and accept that my job is better than 99% of the world, but christ if I'm going to spend the next 20-30 years of my life doing this and filling it with hobbies that also don't have meaningful impact, why even bother.

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The chance of you actually working on something that impacts society in a large way is pretty nil. Even billionaires are lucky if they can have that kind of impact.

For me, thinking smaller and looking at how I can have an impact on my family, friends, and local community is what I have found to be most fulfilling.

> if I'm going to spend the next 20-30 years of my life doing this and filling it with hobbies that also don't have meaningful impact, why even bother.

I understand those thoughts and feelings because I have them myself. That being said, why do you feel like your hobbies also have to be meaningless or have no impact? Volunteering can be a hobby. So can doing something like coaching a kids’ sports team (if you like kids) or mentoring someone or something else along those lines. For me, my job is a way to help my family and other people who are way less fortunate than I am.

Also, and I know this is a “typical” response around here: Have you considered the idea that you may be suffering from depression? Most of the time when the, “why does this shit even matter” feelings hit me it’s because I’m hitting the depression stage of manic depression/bipolar.

>Volunteering can be a hobby. So can doing something like coaching a kids’ sports team

I do volunteer, I'm active in tutoring underprivileged kids for their SAT/ACT's, and otherwise help immigrants fill out their N-100 forms. I take Arabic classes in my spare time, and I fill my free time with various other hobbies (rock climbing, hiking, etc). And that's great that I have an impact on a local community, but in the end, why does it matter? Any bozo with two brain cells to rub together can have an impact on their local community. Aren't all these hobbies just escapism from the fact that my life is centered around this 40 hours a week that I spend debugging gevent or rewriting yet another RPC service?

To me, the acceptance of the reality of "it's extremely unlikely that I'll anything that has a meaningful impact on a large group of people" is the saddest thing of all.

I call it "Nothing matters, everything matters" dilemma.

Every little thing you do has some sort of meaning (even those hours spent debugging) if you choose to give it one.

On the other hand nothing really matters on a large enough scale not the things Bezos, Putin, Musk or any other human does.

Everything is ephemeral as Ecclesiastes already found out.

I think I'd be even more depressed were I put Ozymandias shoes.

There's something else here here. Sure, ultimately everything is ephemeral and futile. But still, there's some ordering to things. The ordering that makes me doing yet another CRUD form that will make some executive slightly richer at the expense of someone else strictly less meaningful and valuable than the stuff Musk does. So even though nothing ultimately matters in the longest of runs, we still have to do things, and we still end up valuing some kinds of things over another.

I go the route of Camus and absurdism:

Perhaps nothing matters, but I will carry on anyway because there is still a chance that something matters.

And really I just want to spite nihilism because it’s self-defeating.

You may find value in studying some stoic philosophers. They have been pondering this question for a long time and have many insights that I have found valuable.

Very much my experience too.

The only thing I found that worked for me in the end was what I call the "just work less" approach.

How?

Cut expenses to the bone, and then cut some more. Go contracting. Aim to work for money maybe three months a year.

I found the non-work portion of the year involved travel, reading, family, writing, and tech projects done for the hell of it. It worked, and my life felt much happier, and more in balance.

One of the biggest problems with the industry (aside from the generally meaningless nature of most of it) is the traditional 40 hour week. It just burns people out too fast.

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