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Making the world a “better” place is overrated. I work for a small, non-VC funded, company where I contribute to products that have the potential to help peopl

Making the world a “better” place is overrated. I work for a small, non-VC funded, company where I contribute to products that have the potential to help people live longer, healthier lives. And I get paid pretty terribly compared to the COL of my area and compared to what I could make in other industries. It seems the vast majority of jobs we deem to “make the world a better place”, pay not great. Teachers, social workers, scientists, healthcare workers outside doc/nurse, non-profit work, etc. Give society what they want. They want to live in a bubble of misinformation, good for them. They want to be angry and incited into violence, good for them. From where I’m sitting, if I help people live longer, I’m shooting myself in the foot. I can barely afford a crappy condo, currently. If I have kids, their lives will be worse because I had some weird need to care about the mission of my work. If YOU think people need to work on problems and for companies that make the world a better place, then you should be working on how to incentivize working on these problems and disincentivizing working in companies that “make the world worse.” You’re going to have to figure out how to get teachers paid as much as a banker, I wish you the best of luck.

smt88 5y ago
> Making the world a “better” place is overrated. It's not a binary. If Facebook is a 7/10 on the evil scale, why not go work for a company that's a 0 or a 1? > Give society what they want. They want to live in a bubble of misinformation, good for them. They want to be angry and incited into violence, good for them. What if it's not what they want? What if what they want is to keep up with friends and family? But then you insert content in between the stuff that they actually want, and that content is enraging? And it makes them feel like they need to do something about it or the world will fall apart for their children? It's not that people turn on a screen to find something to be angry about. They generally hate that. The addictive component is that they feel that they can't look away or they're derelict in their duty to their society. That goes for both ends of the political spectrum, by the way: conservatives think they need to defend society from the enraging "woke" narratives they see, and progressives think they need to defend society from the conservatives. Back when Facebook had no news feed and you could never see posts from a total stranger on the other side of the world, no one was begging Facebook for more rage.

smt88 5y ago

> Making the world a “better” place is overrated. It's not a binary. If Facebook is a 7/10 on the evil scale, why not go work for a company that's a 0 or a 1? > Give society what they want. They want to live in a bubble of misinformation, good for them. They want to be angry and incited into violence, good for them. What if it's not what they want? What if what they want is to keep up with friends and family? But then you insert content in between the stuff that they actually want, and that content is enraging? And it makes them feel like they need to do something about it or the world will fall apart for their children? It's not that people turn on a screen to find something to be angry about. They generally hate that. The addictive component is that they feel that they can't look away or they're derelict in their duty to their society. That goes for both ends of the political spectrum, by the way: conservatives think they need to defend society from the enraging "woke" narratives they see, and progressives think they need to defend society from the conservatives. Back when Facebook had no news feed and you could never see posts from a total stranger on the other side of the world, no one was begging Facebook for more rage.