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To answer your first question, I work on cancer therapeutics. But maybe some perspective from the other end of the “meaningful work” continuum would be helpful in answering the real question.

If your company creates any real utility to a person living a good life (modulo externalities) then I would absolutely consider that to be making the world a better place. We’d all be worse off if everyone at the box factory quit their jobs to go to medical school or run an orphanage or whatever.

So I’d ask yourself: if the thing you work on didn’t exist as a concept in the world, would that be a detriment to anyone? I don’t want to go back to not being able to get an insurance policy online or learning math from youtube. It’s rad that I could email my grandma when I was on the other side of the world. It’s great that I can throw results into PowerPoint (as buggy and flawed as it is) to share with my colleagues at a moment’s notice. There’s a bunch of corporate smarm about bringing people together, but it really is true.

Now, are you making ads more addictive or enabling crypto scammers? Then sure, change jobs. But an economy of our complexity really does take all kinds. There’s no point in saving lives if life isn’t worth living.



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