I'm with you when you say that I find it more engaging now to create useful stuff, or generally beneficial stuff. But when I was a teenager, it was quite diffe

I'm with you when you say that I find it more engaging now to create useful stuff, or generally beneficial stuff. But when I was a teenager, it was quite different. I admired black hats, and people who wrote viruses, because they were playing a game: there were people whose sole existence was based on working against these 'bad guys.' They got paid to fix security holes, to design programs in an 'un-hackable' manner. And yet, the intruders often prevailed. It's a game of outsmarting. There's someone, incredibly smart, trying to prevent you from achieving goal x. He's getting paid, probably has a whole team of experts around him. And yet, you find your way into the system; break it. That sounded almost heroic to me. Of course, the whole metaphor works even better when you're discontent, or even at odds with society at large. Read: when you're pretty much every teenager on this planet :-D