We're creative, and she's an overblown secretary.
– Joey about Joan, Mad Men, S04E08
You're creative. You've got a job where you actually have to use your brain, where you actually create value, where you actually bring added value, where you actually create something, where you actually take creative decisions. You actually shape the world.
Every year, you're learning new stuff. Every year, you have more knowledge. Every year, you're smarter. Every year, your power to create, your control over nature, has increased. You're a geek, you're an architect, you're a programmer, you're a thinker.
You are not an overblown secretary. Overblown secretaries, in fact, comprise a great part of today's jobs. They're not called secretaries, of course. They're executive assistants, lawyers, even executives. Whenever your job amounts to nothing more than filling excel sheets, typing letters, answering e-mails and phone calls, and anyone with half a brain could learn to be as competent (or only marginally less efficient) at it as you'll be after your full career, then, indeed, you are but an overblown secretary.
Which is fine: some of those jobs, albeit certainly not all of them, are productive in the sense that they are necessary for the smooth functioning of business and society. Someone's gotta do them. And you can make money doing them, which is all fine if that's your end goal (or intermediate goal towards another higher purpose). But let's not pretend they can ever be superior, or even equal, in terms of deserved admiration, to the creative job, which the overblown secretaries couldn't do at all, even if they spent a lifetime learning it.
Programmers are curious creatures with an unslakable thirst for personal growth.
You have amazingly powerful tools in your hands and mind, use them to ask and answer the worthwhile questions of life, the universe and everything. Stop mucking about with such legal nonsense and get back to programming.
You are a movie star. Nothing more.
– Howard Hughes, The Aviator