from Hacker News

Time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world

by akbarnama on 4/27/25, 2:44 PM with 105 comments

• by jawns on 4/27/25, 3:18 PM

  This is written from the perspective of someone who doesn't have dependents.

  I'm all about changing the world, but I also have an obligation to take care of my family, so my way of changing the world is working a traditional job, donating to charity from my earnings, and using my time/talent/treasure outside of work hours to make a difference.

• by spicyusername on 4/27/25, 3:41 PM

  It's discussions like these that make romanticizing our non-agrarian ancestors so easy.

  Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions and our correct system of highly specialized labor, it feels as though everyone just hung out together, having a good time, and doing what was needed to feed the tribe. Minus the disease and war, of course.

  There wasn't this need for an existential discussion about this job or that job, or whether you're lifestyle was morally justified.

  There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.

• by Artgor on 4/27/25, 3:09 PM

  > How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

  What if the work itself isn't "the most important" thing in the person's life?

• by quicheshore on 4/27/25, 3:28 PM

  Great read! I didn’t know about Clarkson at all. I know the article talks about all the evils in the world to choose to battle, I will say though as 21 year old it’s easier to be outraged rather than do something. The third category he mentions is what most of the world has become. One thing I did take away is belief in the power to change things is the basic requirement behind moral ambition. Something I intend to work on myself.

• by adverbly on 4/27/25, 3:46 PM

  Incredibly well written.

  Do yourself a favour and actually read the article this time.

  It is very convincing for me personally, and it's got me considering making some big changes.

• by iamsanteri on 4/27/25, 3:12 PM

  Amazing how we keep searching for meaning and purpose, a direction in our lives. I guess this is something eternal and universal.

• by everdrive on 4/27/25, 3:56 PM

  I think the author is confused about just how few jobs provide value to society. Individuals can pivot and take more meaningful positions, but this isn't possible en masse. Even if everyone were will to make bigger sacrifices, there just are not actually that many available jobs that are beneficial.

• by disambiguation on 4/27/25, 4:15 PM

  Yes the tech industry is really lacking people who want to "change the world."

  But its an interesting thought exercise. Slavery seems like a cut and dry issue in terms of harm and human rights, yet overtime the "easy" moral problems are solved and you're left with the gray ones. What's today's moral equivalent of slavery that we need crusaders against?

• by almosthere on 4/27/25, 3:56 PM

  If all non profits went back to doing the mission instead of selling the mission then we'd all be happier at minimum.

• by webdoodle on 4/27/25, 3:29 PM

  I worked IT for over 25 years, and thanks to anti-social media, I now hate most internet technology because of the shitty rich people who use it to abuse the rest of us. I now only work when I have too, and devote the rest of my time to sharing what I've learned about Operation Mockingbird 2.0 and how it's being used to subjugate us all.

  If you really want to change the world, come protest with me at the Sun Valley Conference, AKA the Billionaires SummerCamp on July 6th. This event is where the parasitic rich coordinate the years propaganda, further consolidate there stranglehold on the industry, and train the new round of corporate newspapermen on what information needs to be throttled, distorted, derailed or deleted so that those same rich parasites can stay in power.

• by DavidPiper on 4/29/25, 4:22 AM

  For Category IV people out there, I think the key takeaway from the whole article is actually in an almost throwaway phrase down the bottom:

  > One evening, at a dinner with a few other abolitionists, ...

  Category IV success is only achievable in groups or teams. And our education and capital systems, as well as our social and media systems, are increasingly pushing us towards more isolation:

  - University graduates get earn more money with lower risk in consulting or finance than entrepreneurship (highlighted in the article)

  - High level academia is basically an independent game from my understanding, with some exceptions like some security labs where the same people consistently work together

  - Business structures tend to be designed for maximum specialisation and work extraction of the individual, not teams

  - Third spaces are disappearing outside of work and home

  - In-person relationships are being replaced with social media relationships and parasocial fandoms

  - Politics is being replaced with drama

  > But if that’s irritating to hear – and I imagine it might be – then by all means, prove me wrong. I have learned that there are always exceptions, and I want to show that you can be that exception. It’s never too late to step up.

  It seems the author may not be aware of this though, and ultimately just ends up selling a different brand of individualist grindset.

• by ptero on 4/27/25, 3:39 PM

  Many of such "do the right thing and change the world" pieces assume that most people mostly agree on what "the right thing" is. They do not.

  Pick people from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds and they will have very different views on what would make things better. Not in the end state of "people should be healthy, happy and free to pursue their passions; and we should explore the stars, too", but in "what would be a worthy goal for me to work on, today and for the next few years". And acceptance of such differences is, to me, a good thing: anytime countries are remoralized into pursuing a common moral goal, gulags for those who did not drink the kool-aid are not far away.

  In my book people should not work on things they find immoral. But I am totally fine if my neighbors or my friends are competing against me at work, in technological or in moral space. If they do not consider their work immoral, it is all good. I like hearing their arguments, too, either to steelman my views or to find cracks in them. This likely puts me into the "spineless amoebas, useless species" bucket of the author's classification.

  Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c.

• by MeteorMarc on 4/27/25, 3:00 PM

  Rutger Bregman is so witty, even if sometimes annoying too.

• by ninetyninenine on 4/27/25, 3:22 PM

  The greatest force in human endeavor is self preservation. The next greatest force is self interest. The final force is altruism and moral ambition it is by far the weakest force.

  All three forces have different magnitudes and exist in all of us.

  Capitalism is a system that exploits the second force to the greatest extent and is responsible for economic changes in society that have far exceeded anything produced by altruism alone. Have there been societies and economies that exploit moral ambition? I don’t think here have been examples.

  To truly do good in this world we have to face our own nature. I’d rather be alive and rich before I do any favors for the world. So if you want me to change the world… first tell me what that gives me.

• by Treegarden on 4/27/25, 3:17 PM

  Who decides what is moral? For which moral causes are our contributions beyond a drop in the ocean? I can go work in a soup kitchen, but thats not gonna help thousands or millions of people in need. There is a structural reason why a certain fraction of society becomes in need of a soup kitchen. Can this not be applied to anything? War, famine, natural disasters, poor people that need a lawyer. All these are the result of structural reasons. Can these structural reasons be solved or are they part of the human condition, even part of nature? Manually helping 1+n people in this would not address the root cause. Try to do a scalable solution, but those are hard and I guess most that would wok have been tried. In my childhood I would have needed a tutor, my teachers where terrible. Yet it was not the tutors that would help me now, it was chatGPT. Should I now become a tutor, should I build a openAI competitor, or should I build tutuorAI? If I do marketing at tutorAI will this be a bullshit job? When I build an app, sooner or later I have to solve abstract array puzzles, solving these will make the app work. Work often becomes abstract. Does it mean its now bullshit? If everyone worked at the soup kitchen, would homelessness be solved?

• by dreghgh on 4/27/25, 3:16 PM

  > A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

  This just seems like a confusion to me. My job is the time I spend getting money to pay for the things I need to live. By definition, the work I do then is of value to someone paying me, but not to me. The rest of my time I spend doing things which I can choose, including things I think are a positive contribution to the world.

  I could make sense of arguments such as:

  1. You should consume vastly less, so that you spend less time earning money and more time contributing to improving the world.

  2. Society should be organised differently so that people have to work less and can contribute as they see best in their increased non-paid-work time.

  3. You should spend a lower proportion of your free time doing things that benefit yourself and more doing things which benefit the world.

  But "you should spend the time you dedicate to getting food, clothes, energy and shelter to contributing to good causes?" Doesn't really make sense.

• by ldjkfkdsjnv on 4/27/25, 3:08 PM

  Working an office job is such a profound waste of life. Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard, and with 6-9 months of work, can be achieved. Office jobs will be looked back on as slavery 2.0

• by martindbp on 4/27/25, 4:04 PM

  The problem is "Greatness Cannot Be Planned". There are not many cases where someone ambitious sets out to make the world a better place in a very direct way, who actually accomplished that, because of deceptive objectives. Nobody would have predicted that something as frivolous as PC gaming would lead to the AI boom we're having now, but it did. In many ways, John Carmack did more good by kickstarting the PC graphics race than any morally ambitious do-gooder has ever done. There is one notable exception, and that is Elon Musk. He attacked two extremely difficult industries head on armed only with $100m and grandiose plans, yet somehow made it work by shear force of will. Difficult to replicate, and of course we all hate him now.

  Better probably to do what you find interesting, and maybe it will lead to greatness. If it didn't at least you did something interesting.