Make money doing the work you believe in
Wonderful post! I am not a mathematician by training, although I do use quite a few ideas from mathematics in my research (from C*-algebras to stochastic analysis and differential geometry). However, I spend a lot of time thinking about these matters because I hold more or less the same views as the one expressed by Thurston -- namely, that what really matters is the network of ideas, the shared understanding, the need for what Richard Rorty referred to as "keeping the conversation going." A while ago I wrote down some thoughts about it, inspired by Hermann Weyl's important idea of "the open world:"
"intelligence, natural or artificial, is a joint property of the cognizing subject and the environment in which the subject is embedded, and this is where the tension between limitation and freedom comes into play. The key is to dissolve the limitations of closed formal systems by embedding them in larger open systems, where one has the freedom to introduce new axioms, new rules of inference, and new value systems. This act of reflective creation is what James P. Carse called an infinite game, a game without frontiers or fixed rules, a game which is not played with a fixed goal in mind, but with the motivation to keep playing. As such, it will increasingly involve both humans and AI systems in perpetual interaction."
Hinton's remark about mathematics being a closed system is misguided precisely because he only thinks in terms of finite games, of which "official math" is a quintessential example.
