There is a competing interpretation that this lack of a meaningful life you allude to is in fact the RESULT of a society built on strict financial benefit. You

There is a competing interpretation that this lack of a meaningful life you allude to is in fact the RESULT of a society built on strict financial benefit. You've conflated the terms "meaningful" and "useful". These are not equivalent terms. Meaning is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. Use is an observable action. If I help make a product that gets 16% more people to click on ads for something they didn't need in the first place, I will have been _useful_ to the advertiser (and my own pocket). But to say that gives my life _meaning_ merely displays a twenty-first-century version of the lazy and ignorant naivete that the Humanities have tried to fight against all along. I am not against having a better paying job, nor am I saying folks can't find meaning in software development (or any field, for that matter). And I'm not implying that an English degree should make you a bunch of money. It's just that this whole "learn to do some JavaScript and CSS, change the world!" technohype is just plain bullshit. Do you need to pay $100k to learn the skills to see through such bullshit? No. But the sort of things that the Humanities teach are exactly the prophylactic that one needs to guard against such existential wheel-spinning.