Cool. Then you will never do work that is important to you. Which is totally fine if that's what you want, but to me spending 40h/week on things I consider poin

Cool. Then you will never do work that is important to you. Which is totally fine if that's what you want, but to me spending 40h/week on things I consider pointless sounds hard. The brilliance of Hamming's question is that you, the person being asked, define "important". There is no judgement attached. It's purely a question of your personal fulfillment.