"As if one should be doing something that betters the world, and if you're not then whatever you're doing is a waste." Well, yeah, sorta. I don't think there's

"As if one should be doing something that betters the world, and if you're not then whatever you're doing is a waste." Well, yeah, sorta. I don't think there's any need to bring a moral component into it--we all do what we feel we gotta do to get by, but is it really disputable that we'd have a better world if all the energy that went into selling people crap that is at best useless and at worst blatantly harmful to them instead went into directly improving people's lives? To me that seems like the very definition of waste, though I also think it would be extremely foolish to think you could somehow direct people into behaving any differently. Judging the 'wasted' efforts of others is at least as much a waste as those efforts themselves. It's up to each of us to decide individually whether we can be content selling sugar water or whether we can do better... but I think honesty requires admitting that we can indeed do better, whether or not we choose to do so.