I've been sitting with this for a little while, and I think I've figured out what I want to say.

The first thing is that I 100% identify with and understand what Op's written here. It does feel amazing to be a member of a committed, like-minded group of people all working as hard as they can towards a common, worthy goal--especially when you haven't found a lot of acceptance previously in life. I found this working on US presidential campaigns (etc), all of which were life changing for me in every way I can think of. It's exhilarating in a way I find hard to describe, but I recognize it in this post.

The second thing is that these experiences are, similarly, 100% exploitative. Presidential campaigns aren't good working environments. They're not good for people--even people who enjoy them and seemingly thrive are insidiously destroyed by them. Relationships are very hard. Balance with other aspects of your life (like parenting) is impossible. Taking care of yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally is laughable. Toxic behavior and substance abuse is rampant. More often than not, people use campaigns and "the mission" as excuses to be their worst selves: which means anything you can imagine that might mean (implementing dark patterns, abusing people, workaholism). You are wildly overworked and underpaid. Your relationship to work is forever warped by the workload, the mission, and the experiences (highs, lows, etc). No other job is like it.

Which brings me to the last thing, which is: at least presidential campaigns are for a good cause (well, half of them anyway ;). Stripe seems fine and I enjoy all the posts I read from them, but they're a payments company. We (and by "we" here I mean humanity) don't need young people mortgaging every other aspect of their lives for years to get a payments company off the ground. This goes for ridesharing companies, search engine/ad companies, social networking companies, probably 99.999% of what SV works on (maybe there's a climate change or refugee startup out there that's worthy, hard to know).

We don't need it, and we don't need the fallout from it. We don't need to warp people's sense of work. We don't need managers extorting their ICs with "who will be responsible for your work while you're on vacation" (the answer is "the person who built my team with redundancies so we don't burn out", btw). We don't need to reduce our understanding of our lives to who we are and what we do at work. This isn't a war; it's not us against the fascists. It's a payments company.

I'm pushing 40 at this point (what a wild thing to say haha), and to my fellow near-middle-agers out there, I will say it's up to us to not do this to the next generation. Don't let people work 15 hour days, ever. Don't let people work on weekends. Ensure they take vacations, even if they're just staying home and taking longer showers. Don't text/Slack/whatever them outside work hours. Hold the line when your manager tries to do this to you. Talk about it openly; make this the culture where you work.

If you're looking for an experience like Op describes, this is what community is for. Find a hackerspace, find an activist community to volunteer in, mentor a child. You can find communities of capable, like-minded people without the annihilation of the rest of your life. It's not a necessary component.