True. But the actual work of one's career can also change drastically over time, to become much less meaningful.

For example, when I first got into IT programming in the mid 90's, the work was actually very meaningful and fun. We were building business software applications from complete scratch, and there was a sense of passion, creativity and analysis in what I was doing day to day. Programmers could use their brains to bang out code to build custom use cases and custom UIs, were respected and revered, and got paid accordingly for their creative analysis and technical knowledge.

By the time I got out of that career in the 2010's, IT programmers were reduced to simply integrating off-the-shelf, expensive closed-source software into existing business environments. They essentially became glorified software "babysitters", having to spend their days trying to integrate and debug software that was poorly-written by someone else, often with poor performance, poor configuration, archaic APIs, missing or incomplete documentation, lack of expertise, etc. And these software integrations were often initiated under ridiculous time schedules and low/inadequate budgets, with use-case and performance expectations that could not be met in the time allotted. Or ever. It became soul-crushing work, and I started having bouts of anxiety and depression that I never had in the beginning of my IT career.

What the IT career became in the end, was not something I had signed up for in the beginning. So I got out.