Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

The constraints of time and memory, really pushed me in revisiting a lot of data structures (mostly tries and DAWG), there is not much information out there, and not much libraries already build, so I have to get creative, read a few papers, tech blogs, etc and do it myself.

So, from what I'm reading here, the moral of the story is, probably you will find joy pursuing your own interests, don't expect to find tech–challenges in your average job.

This is the lens through which von Neumann and Morgenstern saw all of human behavior, and their "rational" economics has been hugely influential in public policy. I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational -- many things in life can't be measured in dollars, not even dollars! (E.g. you can't compare a dollar today with a dollar ten years from now. Regardless of your discounting strategy, that money is going to mean something different to you in ten years.)

Your position is a great example of this phenomenon -- there's not really any amount of money that can compensate for a lack of inspiration at work. You might be willing to give up on interesting work for enough dollars, and the rational economist would say that this is the measure of how valuable interesting work is. But there's a long history of studies, notably by Kahneman and Tversky among many others, showing that framing human motivation this way leads to all sorts of paradoxes.

So yes, we have a strong tendency to measure everything with money -- this outlook is deeply embedded in our economic and political systems -- and it makes people miserable because it's a terrible way to account for human happiness.

> One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.

I have no clue either. But it feels to me as if we're turning humanity into a single superorganism, with each one of us being just a cell, except all those cells have brains capable of wishing they'd play on the same level as the superorganism.

Related: I've never had a libertarian bent. I'm known to argue for coordination over individual freedoms. I frequently wondered, just what is it that makes many people say that we're in chains, and (here in the West) we have so little freedoms left. I think I finally realized where this could be coming from.

I've been spending some time recently going, in my head, through a list of activities I'd find exciting. I quickly discovered that most of them are either impossible or illegal, especially when living in a city. Someone (I think pg) wrote that as we entered the industrialized age, we had to invent the whole fake, hollow thing called "exercise" to replace what we've lost in the change of lifestyles. I'm starting to see it as more general pattern - we're losing many more things we could do, and replacing them with structured activities available on the market. They're similar, but also feel fake to me.

> Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift.

That sounds about right (I suppose I should start reading the foundational texts of economic thought at some point). I do not deny that the scheme I described, in which your only role in society is to pick something profitable to do, doesn't work. It generally does (with all coordination problem caveats of the market in mind). But the meaningful work, the virtuous work, the uplifting work, seems to be distributed scarcely and randomly throughout the market space. Much like in the past, you got to be a king or a peasant depending on the lottery of birth, nowadays you can be involved in civilization-changing work, or forever toil on the margin, depending on random chance. Is there even a place for fining meaning in contributing to society? Is there any agency left as to how to contribute? Are we supposed to seek either of it?

I have no answers here. Only a topic I'm trying to think my way through, hoping to find some meaning on the other end.

That's one mental model but it doesn't fit exactly with reality and there are others. See the Love & Money graph here for example. Not quite sure how that fits in with the job hunting. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/does-mo...