> Oh yes. If you want to be like most people, you should stay right where you are.

I don't really have a choice. As a great philosopher said, I am what I am and that's all that I am.

> The question I'm interested in is: where should most people be? Are they where they should be? Is the current world the best we can do?

These questions can only be answered by actions. You're doing the right thing: you're creating the kind of software that you want to see in the world. That's really the highest service that a programmer can perform.

I actually think we probably agree on how crappy most software is. But whereas your answer seems to be "depend less on software", my answer is to rebuild the whole (software) world from scratch. We'll see which one of us is crazier.