Professional joy can be about a lot more than just making as much money as possible. If anything is sad it's that someone fails to understand this basic thing. We're thinking, often fantastically creative beings, and our lives need not focus only on family, love and friends. They can also be partly absorbed by our external pursuits, professionally, as an outlet for all that cognitive power inside us.

Should the creator of the WWW be sad that it gave him joy? Or the scientists who programmed the Apollo missions, because they also made money off these things or worked for others while doing so at times? Or in a different direction, should a Picasso or Anthony Hopkins not take enormous pleasure from a life time of professional creation? Much more banal examples are just as valid, as long as they gave sincere happiness to those living them.

What a bizarrely narrow definition you have of professional joy.

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zwnow 3 days ago | parent [-]

Should the people who built Palantir be proud of their work? Or the people who built Amazons employee surveillance?

	▲	southernplaces7 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		What an idiotic whataboutism that has nothing to do with my main point. Because people who work for morally ambiguous projects might also be proud of their professional work, nobody working on anything else should be? Or what are you saying, because it seems a bit muddled. Also, to answer specifically to these folks, maybe they shouldn't be morally, but if it made them personally proud, as far as quality of life FOR THEM personally goes, it's still a valid example. Morality and personal happiness aren't always directly connected in some people.