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Comment by coconut_crab | Hacker News Reader

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

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Providing for your family is a perfectly respectable 'mission' in life as far as many people are concerned. Pursuing grand ambitions can take a heavy toll on a family, and it's perfectly sane to choose a more well-travelled path if that's what you value.

Yeah, I agree. Ultimately I'm working so I can enjoy the rest of my life.

This desire to "help people in need" and seeming guilt over taking care of you and your own "instead" is a thing I don't understand. If you don't support you and your family, then you and your family become people in need while at the same time you have nothing to spare for other unfortunate individuals.

Charity begins at home.

Can you find a suitable job in your area that still pays decently well (maybe not quite as good as your current job) but also makes you feel better about your work?

I think that sometimes a sense of contentment and meaning can be worth a lot of money. Assuming that the basics of life are taken care of, of course.

Maybe you could view in a different way? There are people who want to promote services which actually help society and humanity using tools you helped to create. Even if it is just one person or company! :)

Sometimes you have to work on something that's not your mission to give you the time to work on your mission - however infrequently that may then be.

You can still help people in need, just do what you can do.

There are lots of CRUD apps that help people in need.

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