I actually use this line of reasoning to motivate and inspire some of my own art and cultural artifacts. When a far future galactic civilization pauses to ask, “who are we and where did we come from“, they might just look back at the ledger of humanity’s written outputs. In this sense, the entire trace we manage to save to disk could be viewed as a body of work were any of it to survive. Even pieces of work that nobody reads today could have a long line of future audiences and help shape the galaxy’s understanding of its cultural heritage. (These future entities might have far more processing power and bandwidth to spend on the analysis of our work).

This is how I used to see it. It made my work feel special just knowing that other people would use it and appreciate it.

I think because I felt a stronger sense that other people were my kin.

Now I feel like I don't belong, I feel that I am different and I don't know how to interpret other people's appreciation because they probably don't feel it the way I do when I appreciate something. I feel more exploited than appreciated.

Part of me is wondering if some people who used my open source projects thought to themselves "What a sucker... Working for free so I can monetize his work." And getting some kick out of that. There's a fundamental difference of values there. It didn't occur to me that this is the lens through which a lot of people view the world.