I think the concern is deep, deeper than mitigations like going up the abstraction chain from coding to design, or lessons learned from failure. It's very, ver

I think the concern is deep, deeper than mitigations like going up the abstraction chain from coding to design, or lessons learned from failure. It's very, very difficult to really realize that one's sacrifice was meaningless or mistaken. Effort - sacrifice - in particular is for the sake of something else; you burn your precious life/time for the sake of X, and then X doesn't work or turns out to be an illusion. You can console yourself with lessons learned, but it's a bit hollow. And worse, if you wasted someone else's time? Almost unrecoverable. Then you're not only less useful (stale skills), but also less susceptible to going gung-ho on the new goal X', making you a poor candidate for any employers or investors since being resilient and formidable are necessary for any uncertain endeavor. The Confucian Ta Hsueh (Great Learning) says "Every day, make it new" was inscribed on the bathtub of the first Shang dynasty emperor: 湯之盤銘曰：「茍日新，日日新，又日新 Traditionally, the solution was a kind of selflessness, where you realize that even if (as with Ecclesiastes) empires you build will fall into dust, you can still help others. But in an age where interactions reduce to endless scrolling and online forums, it's not clear where and how to do that.