| You make a good point. I've latched onto some goals (like making games) because I forget that they're a stepping stone to something bigger. The bigger thing would have been the web framework, or the programming language. But even those aren't quite big enough. If I'm being honest, the biggest stuff is curing disease, eliminating wealth inequality.. biblical stuff. Truly I want to be an inventor and work to solve the very hardest problems. So it feels undignified to be fixing someone's computer when I could be helping researchers to like, cure death and stuff. But you're right, that act of helping someone is the very essence of our humanity and shouldn't be written off as something inconsequential just because it's not glorious. There is glory to be found though, a different kind of glory in that covenant. And I totally agree about AGI. Edit: as far as scarcity goes, I think that economics correctly attempts to allocate resources between people with unlimited wants and needs. It just never got as far as the endgame we're in now, where the primary scarce resource is time. That's an artificial scarcity, so we might have a chance to turn things around if we optimize for that instead of material wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity |
With that said, I’m consumed with FOMO and opportunity cost every day. I’ve missed the boat on being founder-level or early designer/engineer on so many projects that have gone on to raise Series B it’s mind numbing. Also, we were paid $0 bootstrapping our stuff in the first five years, and now finally we get paid, but $60k a year.
I’m saying this as a warning to all devs and designers out there. Do NOT do this. If you can get into Google or FAANG or whatever, build wealth that way. Maybe you’ll feel like a sell-out or you never scratched your itch or done something good for the world, but then you can also remember you can take a year off in Bali or whatever.