On the contrary, no community I've ever known in my life has ever made me feel so empowered. The "real world" is packed with people who will belittle and disre

On the contrary, no community I've ever known in my life has ever made me feel so empowered. The "real world" is packed with people who will belittle and disregard your achievements and abilities, you will be told again and again that people like you will simply be replaced by counterparts in a third world country willing to do what you do for sixteen hours a day at five dollars per hour. This comes from fear and ignorance but is so universal amongst the general populace that you can start wondering if they might be onto something. A community like this is concrete evidence that they are dead wrong; That what we do matters, and that it is not wrong to take pleasure and pride in it. It betrays the attempts to sideline the work and misdirect attention to the importance of politics and salesmanship, neither of which have any spoils to be arguing over or peddling respectively in the absence of the essential process of making wealth and not just money. Most of all it makes me not hate the world like I used to, because it shows me what humans can be and not what they seem to be when I stand in a random room in meatspace and take a look around.