Sour grapes is when
you can't have something, so you say it must be bad as a cope. I
am successful in tech. It just took until my mid 30s to be a millionaire working on infrastructure instead of my late 20s working on surveillance, but I am perfectly happy with that. I have everything I could want, and
didn't need to make those compromises. I say the thing is bad because
it's bad.
I might be lucky (in a sense I am, but in another sense "all" I've done is work boring normal jobs and have low expenses), so maybe my path is not perfectly reproducible, but that's kind of the point of temptation: it has to be tempting. And quick, easy, sure money is the bait. You'll never even be held accountable. The only cost is looking around at the bad things in the world and knowing it wouldn't have been there without you.
Personally, the only reason I have to continue working these days is to give my kids a better future, so creating a hellscape for them to inherit would defeat the purpose.
I might be lucky (in a sense I am, but in another sense "all" I've done is work boring normal jobs and have low expenses), so maybe my path is not perfectly reproducible, but that's kind of the point of temptation: it has to be tempting. And quick, easy, sure money is the bait. You'll never even be held accountable. The only cost is looking around at the bad things in the world and knowing it wouldn't have been there without you.
Personally, the only reason I have to continue working these days is to give my kids a better future, so creating a hellscape for them to inherit would defeat the purpose.