Workaholism leads to health problems, work addiction risk depends on occupation

Don't shame someone's escapism in the face of something life altering. You don't know his suffering, but try and come across more empathetic.

I'm not sure how your point counts as a disagreement. You're telling me about how unessential you are, and I don't see how that matters. Nearly everybody is unessential. Heck, being "essential" depends on other people's opinion, and I don't see how their opinion matters either. There's nobody in the world that's really essential.

Before the needs of the world comes the needs of oneself. Though we can enjoy being important to others, nobody needs that to enjoy life. It's just one way to do it.

There's nothing wrong with a mundane life either. Many people even covet for a simple, ordinary life. I did. I was dealt a bad hand (perhaps avoidable/fixable with more effort by me, though that's in hindsight), that I thought I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I learned to accept it, commit to it, and enjoy what I still had available to enjoy. Things got better to my surprise and dismay (yes, it was very conflicting), but I would have been fine even if it didn't.

Even members of the lowest social/economic classes laugh heartedly at times and have their own ways to enjoy their time.

> Imagine you saw someone doing something that you loved... Could you honestly say that seeing that would make you happy?

I was trying to write in broad terms. Their wish might not be because the act would make them happy. Rather, one can wish for a task they want done. Even if the person doing it doesn't enjoy it, if it gets the task any closer to completion, then that could make them happy.

As an example, if someone dying is worrying about the care of a dependent loved one, taking steps to care for that dependent person would make them happy no matter how much you might hate it. There's no completion to it either. Any amount of care would be welcomed, I think.

> FWIW I did look into being a living organ donor.

If your health isn't so bad that you're close to dying, then that's also very wasteful in my opinion. You can achieve more with a healthy body. Leave the donation until after you die. There'll always be someone in need of an organ. Even if you provide one now, that'll just leave someone in the future without an organ you could have provided then.

You seem fixated on the happiness of others. Can't you be a little more selfish? You should be able to enjoy life on your own. Actually, you should be able to enjoy it even if you were the only living being on this planet. Even in those circumstances, I think I'd lack time to fully enjoy life. I'd probably spend my time either studying something to make sense of the world or developing skills. That'd be my enjoyment even if there's no one to acknowledge me. I hear others enjoy the feeling of aching muscles after a day's work. I imagine they'd enjoy building stuff, maybe a garden. With the abundance of things we have, it's a matter of choosing the best way to spend our time rather than having trouble finding anything at all. Can't you find a hobby? There's an infinitude of things to enjoy.

Re: finding another rock. You don't need to be irreplaceable to be loved. You can be the support of someone that would appreciate it and find joy that way, too.

Though if work works, then I think that's good too. I had written these other comments on that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767695

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767160

Edit: When I made the shift initially from dev to SDET, I had a 50% pay rise. In London I regularly get approached for £85k/$100k roles as an SDET. True devs might earn more than that at the same companies but it’s already much higher than most devs earn in the UK, and I’m not experienced enough to compete for the dev counterpart roles.

How do you make the difference between being talked down because of gender, or because you didn’t practice the skills at the game enough, or bad relations or similar? Is it really the boy’s role to make the experience beautiful for girls? in which case, boys would have the gendered role of explaining the games to girls.

> gatekeeping games

You see, that is my point. Pretty much all activities of real life are gatekept. Programming is the only one that isn’t.

As a boy, 7 years old, my father took both my bigger sister and myself to explain the MS-DOS commands he knew. But does reading the 500-pages book on GW-BASIC by myself to understand how it works, even though I was French and 7yo and I had zero knowledge of English, sound like good gatekeeping to you? But my sister was then invited to various activities in school, including the school programming club if she wanted, but she chose the football club (and this was in the 1990ies). I wasn’t.

So I stuck with programming. No gatekeeping, no social inclusion, just RTFM until you understand the commands.