So, I think about how I could only write the software I want to write a decent amount.
What did you do?
I've been programming since I was 14, I really love computers but the business aspect really turns me off. I can do it well if I need to but it just doesn't interest me like the operating systems, programming languages, virtual machines...
So when the time came for me to choose between a career in technology or something else like medical or law school, I chose something else. I'm somewhat comfortable now, still developing my career. I come here every day to read and talk about technology and sometimes I'll even publish a project on GitHub. Still wonder what it would have been like had I made a different choice.
All of my colleagues (at the company) share the same mentality, we all work for money/resources. Most of us don't use any form of enthusiasm or emotional projection on a business task. We use a craftsmanship approach towards a product building. We strive to produce quality. It sounds banal, but it's true, and it works for us.
This is completely normal. There is a conflict between what you know on a deep level and the false consciousness you are required to uphold, and that you do uphold by completing the work.
The ground truth is that, even though your boss probably isn't a bad or mean person, he too has a boss, who has a boss, and following the chain one almost always finds a vested interest in a corrupt status quo whereby a small set of hereditarily connected rent-seekers who stifle progress and don't care about anything but expanding their own wealth and power.
You can make money by collecting small donations from normal, decent people, but there aren't that many to go around, because the fact is that normal humans have almost no economic freedom. Modulo a rounding error, all money is blood money: it comes either from wealthy people and corporations who have evil intentions, or from governments that might have decent intentions but have been corrupted by evil psychopaths from the private-sector elite.
The fact that rich people are paying us to do something is as strong a signal as there could be that what we're doing is poisoning the world, possibly in a way we don't fully understand. Plus, any time we do something as a subordinate, we know that if we perform too well, we are sending a signal to people who are humiliating us (even if in a superficially professional and kind way) that treating us as subordinates works, and encouraging them to humiliate us even more.
The only reason the system doesn't collapse in an afternoon is that we're indoctrinated into bourgeois false consciousness. But something tells me you knew that already.
Case in point, posted here just yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479652
Sometimes it feels like there's only two options: become one of these rent-seekers or find a way to opt out of this system.
The reason is that very few people prefer farming over their current jobs. No need for the poor-vs-rich demagoguing. What does "bourgeois false consciousness" even mean?
Technology is a good thing. Industry is a good thing. We can keep them.
What we don't need is the ruling class. They take the lion's share of the resources, and they don't do anything useful to justify what we pay to subsidize their pampered existences. We can rip them out and things will still work.
What false dichotomy? Either you are within the hierarchy that is humanity or you go (relatively) independent, meaning you need to produce your own food at the very least.
Instead of hating humanity for what it inherently is, maybe your anger comes from an understanding that the rules aren't fair. So maybe propose that we should strive for a world where the laws are fairer, so that people can feel that their efforts are not in vain and that they're not being taken advantage of.
>They take the lion's share of the resources, and they don't do anything useful to justify what we pay to subsidize their pampered existences.
That sounds like ideology without logic:
"They take the lion's share of the resources" -> Actually, they earn it based on the current set of laws, through some variable amount of effort.
"pampered existence" -> No need to name call. We all have different circumstances in life. Don't worry, those people you hate have their own problems and their own stressors. They're just different than yours. Just because they have plenty of food and shelter doesn't mean their lives are all smiles.
"subsidize" -> fix the laws or whatever is causing the subsidizing, if indeed there is subsidizing. Hating the players is not productive.
"they don't do anything useful" -> they run companies, they run the government, etc. Those are useful things.
This is not the response I expected, and doesn't even really speak to what I asked. "How did you work more on the things you wanted to?" doesn't mean I expect to somehow magically only ever get to do what I want.
"Rich people paying us" automatically equaling evil is just such a weird thought. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and someone's got to do the work of keeping them alive, and most of that work is not going to be fun work someone wants to do.
That's reality. We're already lucky we get to write software instead of cleaning sewers or whatever. You can debate how necessary a lot of the jobs that exist are or aren't, or how wealth is distributed in society, but the fact that jobs exist that people don't really want to do isn't the result of some evil conspiracy cooked up by a cabal of rich people... it's just physics. Someone has to grow the vegetables.
If I paid you to garden tomatoes for me, is that "a signal" that I'm "poisoning the world"? If you don't like gardening, but I pay you enough that now you'll do it, does that somehow make me evil?
Weird, man.