> It’s boring and people only do it because they’re too socially unsuccessful to participate in things that are actually fun,

To throw some bombs the other way, I think there's a legit feeling that a lot of the socialization/fun that humanity gets up to is frivolous, pointless, dis-engaged, solipsistic avoidance of how they are spending their lives. We are all engaged in distracting ourselves at some level (Terror Management Theory[1]), and while it is popularly accepted that being popular & social is how one wins, I think there have been a lot of folks who feel other callings, to do, to make, to explore, and often it's less than clear how to do these activities socially. Einstein only found two other people in the world when he made the Olympia Academy[1], but that was enough. Other people wouldn't call that social fun, but it engaged him, and I would judge more earnestly & wholly & to greater joy than most people's social fun.

> so they convince themselves spending hundreds of hours making boring stuff is actually a good use of their time. I understand that some programming is great, but since 99% of all software is not interesting, I don’t believe the amount of people who say they love it.

I'm much more sympathetic to this all. So much of my first post was about the split, the difficulty, of doing software development from within the confines of the corporate-industrial environment.

There are endless fun challenges & explorations to get up to (from within those confines). There's so many things that feel good about programming, about feeling like one has gotten on top of these confounding complex problems, & built a secure well structured coherent domain for oneself. I think there is fun here, genuine fun, but I also think it's distracting & shallow. It's the social gossip of software development. Decoupled from what one is doing.

Most software is, alas, built in corporate-industrial manner. Most programmers are merely producers, not imaginators, not true creators, very much by design of the corporate-industrial system, & it's accepted as 99.999% hard fact that programmers need the help of other people or else they will make horrible software that won't help users. Very little software that is written, I would say, is written by software. This wraps up into the whole corporate-industrial software problem, that software is always intent on being product, on consumerization, and I strongly feel it's the lack of trust & lack of exploration that keeps 99% of software in the not-interesting realm, that keeps computers as a whole impervious & uninteresting & uncompelling & unknown (the proverbial kids who know a couple apps really well but nothing more about computing).

Most of the programmers you meet, who you accuse of not being passionate: perhaps you are right. They're having fun, but how engaged are they? Are they avoiding the fear of death, engaging themselves in industrial fun? Or do they really have a passion, see the world truly, have some sense of place of it all, & feel a connection to something? Are they facing the terror of death earnestly, more genuinely; have they advanced beyond the socializing masses? I think your doubts are well founded. I think we ought be critical, try to keep a cosmic brain view & skepticism, of ourselves & our applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_Academy