If you can't see the gulf between being a doctor who dedicates his/her life to doing surgery in remote, third-world locations, for a pittance, in order to restore the lives of poor women, vs sitting in a comfy office in the first world developing software on a $2500 computer for a $400+ device… what can I say to persuade you?

Sure, there are some bits of software that save lives… but that's not what the "startups" in question are doing, is it?

The rest is simple convenience. Convenience is nice and all, and everybody loves it, and it pays well, and it can increase human productivity and connectedness, but that isn't really world-changing.

Nobody on HN is inventing the next telegraph, or the next x-ray. It's all variations and slight improvements on things that already exist. It's just software. No big deal. And yet the phrase "changing the world" or "change the world" is the one on everyone's lips.

Make no mistake, I love what I do, and I'm not cut out to be that doctor in any way. I'm happy with my place in the world. I've also got no illusions that, in the grand scheme of things, I'm 'changing the world' or, really, very important to anyone but my immediate circle of loved ones. Believe me, this is a better way to live.

The more you talk yourself up, the more you believe you're super ultra important and doing super ultra important work, the more you create a gulf between your exterior grandiose persona people see and your interior doubt and insecurity, the more you are isolated, the more you are alone, the more you risk losing if you make a mistake, the more social excoriation you (feel) you deserve/are likely to get, the more scared you are to ask for help or admit fear, the more hopeless you feel when you fuck up, the more likely you are to cut yourself off from others, to work yourself to death, to commit suicide.

And the saddest part of all is that it was all in your head. You weren't that important to start with. You can fuck up and the world keeps turning, just as it had. Nobody dies because you run out of money or kill your startup through an oversight.

Having a realistic understanding of your importance to the world makes you free to experiment, to ask for help, to admit failure, to make mistakes, and not feel badly about it. You don't have to feel like you're losing face, risking anything, or letting anyone down.

Grandiosity, on the other hand, imbues every act with such great importance that it seems like a matter of life or death. Grandiosity feels good right up until it becomes clear you're just a human after all. Unfortunately, then grandiosity sometimes literally becomes a matter of life or death.

It's deadly easy to substitute one factually false self-image (grandiosity) with another factually false self-image (despairing that you're the worst person ever and there's no escape).

This is sad. And it's all the more sad because it's totally avoidable.

NB: If you recognize yourself in the descriptions of grandiosity (and its side effects) above, know that I'm not a doctor. But my best recommendation is the audiobook (specifically the AUDIO book) of When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. It's a life-saving, life-affirming dose of reality.