I assure you most Haskell programmers have taken the mandatory computer organization/architecture courses in uni. That knowledge wouldn't (shouldn't?) influence

I assure you most Haskell programmers have taken the mandatory computer organization/architecture courses in uni. That knowledge wouldn't (shouldn't?) influence your excitement about programming paradigms. I think the bigger problem is the way you describe the usefulness of the work you do, how it's about satisfying your customers needs. If you could somehow put yourself before your customers, how would you do things differently? I sometimes code in Ruby, even though writing it in Python would be better for my business. I'm pretty fluent in Python, but Python is a shitty programming language and working in it for too long makes me sad. I don't think this discussion should be focusing on programming languages, just switching programming languages is probably not going to make you happy. If you think about a moment that made you happy in tech, even if it's long ago, what was it that you got enjoyment from? Maybe you could reproduce and amplify that. You seem to draw pride from knowing lower level stuff, did you know in the past 10 years hardware design went from something you need an expensive lab, loads of money and months of time for, to something you could do on the weekend using open source tools, order the PCB and you'll have it before the next weekend with the parts wave soldered on to it. Watch some Phil's Lab videos on Youtube and you'll have a working FPGA+DDR3 board in a couple of months and you can flow those electrons exactly like you want them to. Sometimes diving deep is fun, you could utterly solve some super niche market by being a lone wolf programmer that's hyper focused. Sometimes there's some big ChatGPT style opportunity that you could use to tackle some big issue with a synergetic team.