The Privilege of Meaningful Work

One of the things that keeps me in the startup fray is the desire to earn the privilege of meaningful work.

Not only is most work meaningless to the people who do it, but worse... quite a bit of my work throughout my programming career has never even seen the light of day. I've spent years working on products that get cancelled for stupid reasons, often before even really testing the market for them.

Most of it also feels way beneath my intellectual ability.

It seems to me that not having your time wasted and working at your ability are supreme privileges doled out only to the rich or those "tapped" by the academic establishment.