> Some nights I lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering if I've wasted my time learning something as vapid and meaningless as computer science. The first i

> Some nights I lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering if I've wasted my time learning something as vapid and meaningless as computer science. The first instinct I had when reading this was to say that had I known that computer science and programming weren't the same thing, I might have done something different with my life. But I'm really happy I did: CS introduced me to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and has helped me learn how to think about problems in a way that I don't know I would've gotten merely through programming. CS introduced me to Cantor's Diagonalization Argument, and that has been a subject I've thought about on and off for a little while. CS introduced me to the ideas of complexity and computability, both of which are somewhat philosophical disciplines, not merely tools for program analysis. I was probably predisposed to think about these things anyway, and it's not as though CS was the only way to learn--but it was a good way to eat, too. (I'm given to understand that pure philosophy tends to make it harder to pay the bills.) > What people compensate you for is wasted time. All those nights you decided to fiddle with NGINX instead of drinking with friends, the times you pushed away a loved one or a partner just to polish a commit before you pushed it, the years you wasted talking with people who will never see eye-to-eye with you but demand an argument nevertheless; Work is a per se good, but it isn't the ultimate good. It is dignified and dignifying, but debases us when work becomes a master rather than a servant. Work to live: this is good; live to work: this is bad.