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Comment by johncoltrane | Hacker News Reader

I work because I must provide for my family. That's enough meaning for me.

Same, I help writing systems to 'optimise advertisement effectiveness' == encourage consumerism and maybe creative negative value for society. It sucks but I have to support my family and extended family as the main bread earner.

On the other hands, I often donate to wikipedia, supporting local FOSS communities and mentoring young students. Currently helping my friend with his air pollution measurement station project too. All that I won't be able to do if I take a lower paying job but more meaningful job (previously I was working as a civil engineer, building bridge and stuff).

> It sucks but I have to support my family and extended family as the main bread earner.

May be you can find a different work which may pay a bit less but doesn’t create negative value for the society?

It's very hard to find one like that with all the VC money poured in, only those cool startups get all the money. I am making 3~5 times as much as friends who are working in civil/mechanical engineering.

This.

All other "meaningfulness" is just pure bonus. And no: I am not unhappy, nor unfulfilled.

Would you provide for your family at any cost? Forget about meaning. What if your work is causing harm to some people or a lot of people? Like the wall street or Cambridge Analytica or Palantir?

Are you pitching a TV show? Because where I live, no one has to choose between certain death and working on cool tech for corrupt spooks except in TV shows.

Providing my family, doesn't have "any cost". It costs at least 50K€/year around here and, if my LinkedIn feed and the official stats concerning my domain of expertise are to be believed, I could slam the door any day and start at another tech company within a week.

But, assuming we are in a TV show, yes. I would gladly harm tens of thousands of unnamed, faceless nobodies and please tens of thousands of others if it helped me keep my loved ones out of the gutter. Especially if it meant playing with the cool tech at Palantir :-)

same to me. hard to invent another meaning so far..

That's not "meaningful", is merely necessary.

Is there some reason they're mutually exclusive? Eating is necessary, but it can be meaningful even if the food is simple. Working in order to build your life can also be meaningful.

Well, meaning has scale, and on the human scale, what OP describes is extremely meaningful. On the local scale, raising good kids can do good things for the community. On the county level, things get fuzzy. It's probably better that his family is well looked after and tax money goes to the state. Net positive? Probably.

On a planetary scale? Universal Scale? Of course it doesn't matter, but what would be the point of caring about that except at length? We're not universal scale. I'm not a planet. I'm a human, and I care about other humans and the communities I'm part of.

Upvoted. And on the bigger scales, I have detailed views on what matters and why (because of a belief in God, with a long list of reasons for it all :) I wrote or linked to a bit of it here but there is more if interested:

http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618453.html

http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618449.html

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