Throughout my career I have tried my best to avoid work in industries that I consider as doing harm, e.g. oil & gas, defence and financial services companies like JP Morgan that have a large prescence locally.

In the last few years I have worked for a cloud consultancy with similar values, however, I have still found myself working on projects for clothing companies that I would consider as fast-fashion with questionable supply chains.

I am starting to wonder if I need to take my skillset in another direction to find more meaningful work. I took an interest in C# and microservices in the past and while that has worked out well for me, it seems to have locked me into a very enterprise world with values that rarely align to my own.

Has anyone faced a similar dilemna? Basically, I am struggling to find my Ikigai as I do not feel like the world needs the work that I am doing.


There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

  • JJROKCZ
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    English
    21 year ago

    This is exactly why I got out of healthcare IT, it wasn’t my fault half the products used by the hospital were outdated crap but i felt horrible whenever they would break and I was struggling to get this equipment/system working again that was used to diagnose or treat people’s life threatening conditions.

    Now I work in an absolutely unethical business but at least no lives are dépendant on my work