The Reddit/smartphone/etc is a separate problem. Even if you had a generous basic income and no job, it could be enough to ruin your life. In my experience, taking an offline vacation is a huge boost in productivity. (Even if that vacation includes taking care of two little kids all day long.)
But I completely agree with your description of how job feels fundamentally wrong. Most of the complexity you deal with is accidental; after you solve it, you don’t feel like you learned or accomplished anything substantial. The reward for completing some work is getting more work. Maybe if you work twice as hard, consistently for years, someone will notice and you will get a 10% raise, but then you are expected to keep working twice as hard forever. Productivity is generally a result of team effort, and if you become too productive, people will be removed from your team until it becomes sufficiently hard to meet the deadlines again. Vacation is too short to do your own project that would put some meaning into your life; the weekend is barely enough to relax a bit and do the necessary home maintenance. Anything you try doing in parallel with your job is interrupted every day, which makes it hard to focus on it. The only “win conditions” are surviving to old enough age to retire, or somehow saving enough money to retire early. The work is not really that hard, and there are many incompetent people around you who still somehow manage to keep their jobs, and yet it is somehow optimized to take away most of your time, attention, and energy. And everyone keeps bitching about the lack of competent software developers, but if you ask for extra vacation or part-time work at an interview, nope, they would rather wait yet another year to fill the position.
Though I wonder how much of this feeling is true of jobs in general, and how much is specifically about software development. At some moment my wife noticed that those among our friends who complain about their work a lot, all happen to work as programmers. Of course, correlation is not causation, maybe people interested in programming are just inherently more prone to depression.
The largest source of meaning are for me currenly my kids. Sometimes people who don’t have kids themselves ask me why I made this choice, when everyone knows that kids are annoying, cost you time and money, your quality of life goes down, yadda yadda. So, here is why being a parent is way more meaningful than having a job. (Girls, pay extra attention; getting you from homes to factories and offices was a scam of century, here is why.) Parenting has all these perks that you hope your job might have, but it never will: There is always a medium- and long-term progress. If you do your work at least half-decently, you are rewarded by human affection. The older and more independent your kids are, the easier it gets; if you do it right, they can actually help you. There is a clear goal: transform your kids into functional adults, then they will leave their home, and hopefully sometimes come to visit you, but now as friends, not as a burden. And you get credit for all of this. You keep doing something meaningful, it keeps getting better, and then it is done!
The Reddit/smartphone/etc is a separate problem. Even if you had a generous basic income and no job, it could be enough to ruin your life. In my experience, taking an offline vacation is a huge boost in productivity. (Even if that vacation includes taking care of two little kids all day long.)
But I completely agree with your description of how job feels fundamentally wrong. Most of the complexity you deal with is accidental; after you solve it, you don’t feel like you learned or accomplished anything substantial. The reward for completing some work is getting more work. Maybe if you work twice as hard, consistently for years, someone will notice and you will get a 10% raise, but then you are expected to keep working twice as hard forever. Productivity is generally a result of team effort, and if you become too productive, people will be removed from your team until it becomes sufficiently hard to meet the deadlines again. Vacation is too short to do your own project that would put some meaning into your life; the weekend is barely enough to relax a bit and do the necessary home maintenance. Anything you try doing in parallel with your job is interrupted every day, which makes it hard to focus on it. The only “win conditions” are surviving to old enough age to retire, or somehow saving enough money to retire early. The work is not really that hard, and there are many incompetent people around you who still somehow manage to keep their jobs, and yet it is somehow optimized to take away most of your time, attention, and energy. And everyone keeps bitching about the lack of competent software developers, but if you ask for extra vacation or part-time work at an interview, nope, they would rather wait yet another year to fill the position.
Though I wonder how much of this feeling is true of jobs in general, and how much is specifically about software development. At some moment my wife noticed that those among our friends who complain about their work a lot, all happen to work as programmers. Of course, correlation is not causation, maybe people interested in programming are just inherently more prone to depression.
The largest source of meaning are for me currenly my kids. Sometimes people who don’t have kids themselves ask me why I made this choice, when everyone knows that kids are annoying, cost you time and money, your quality of life goes down, yadda yadda. So, here is why being a parent is way more meaningful than having a job. (Girls, pay extra attention; getting you from homes to factories and offices was a scam of century, here is why.) Parenting has all these perks that you hope your job might have, but it never will: There is always a medium- and long-term progress. If you do your work at least half-decently, you are rewarded by human affection. The older and more independent your kids are, the easier it gets; if you do it right, they can actually help you. There is a clear goal: transform your kids into functional adults, then they will leave their home, and hopefully sometimes come to visit you, but now as friends, not as a burden. And you get credit for all of this. You keep doing something meaningful, it keeps getting better, and then it is done!