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Comment by washedup | Hacker News Reader

The key to a happy and successful life is to find meaningful ways to spend your time. Meaningful to you, of course. Because of the monetary system we live in, usually a large chunk of our time needs to be devoted towards earning money, or at least finding a way to eat, live comfortably, and reproduce (too scientific sounding?). Buddhist monks will be able to show you other ways to enjoy life outside that system, however. That's always an option.

Work is not misery as long as you believe in, and are constantly engaged with, your work. It becomes misery when it doesn't align with your needs and expectations.

The biggest question is, what would you rather do? What would you do with your free time if money wasn't an issue?

If you are happy with your product, then what is it about the work environment? Does simply managing people stress you out? Or, is it the expectation that "I should" enjoy what I do because it is successful?

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The vast majority of the job postings I see are for companies optimizing the way other companies sell stuff to consumers. I don't find any meaning in that. Even the "great" jobs (ones where you can focus purely on a technical challenge) don't hold much allure: why optimize technology for the sake of optimizing technology?

Where am I to look for jobs where I have agency in the choice of technology and the direction of the product, a group of intelligent and supportive peers, and a product that directly improves the lives of others? These types of jobs seem to be a vanishingly small percentage of those that are available (not even accounting for the further filtering that happens: skill match, inteviewing, salary requirements, etc).

I run the engineering team at www.hometeamcare.com

It might not be immediately apparently from our website jobs here definitely satisfy all of your criteria. Let me know if you want to chat.

The problem isn't that there isn't any impactful work, its that impactful work is hard to identify at the outset. We've allowed narratives to shape our view of how "impact" gets made: the aha moment when a scientist discovers something in a movie. But the underlying connections between breakthroughs are much more subtle and actually impossibly difficult to predict.

Who would have guessed that the video game industry would push graphics cards to a point where they are now incredibly beneficial to scientific applications? You could say the makers of PC games were just optimizing things for consumers, but there is a direct connection between what they did and the computing power we have for worthwhile applications today.

Who would have guessed, in 1847, that Boole's philosophical papers on logic, would form the foundations of computing a hundred years later? George Boole died without every knowing any of this.

The most impactful changes in people's lives are rarely direct. Seeking "impactful" goals is a trap in my experience. Find something that excites you and if its creative, my money's on that being more useful than you think.

Why "reproduce"? Don't produce the next generation of slaves. On balance, life is misery. Leave the unborn in peace.

Biologically speaking we are wired to produce kids, as such many people find deep meaning and satisfaction by raising a family. Of course this isn't for everyone, but I put it down as a driver for why people behave they way they do.

On balance, life is neutral.

Because it's more rewarding than what almost any of us do at work. And in some ways raising a child with your values is a vote for the future direction of the world.

(Father of two very young children.)

On balance, life is what we all force it to be by our collective efforts. We should make it wonderful.

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