Comment by bawolff
2 months ago
I don't know i agree. I think its brave to be honest about it. Being able to acknowledge you don't have it together is the first stage of growth.
Most people struggle with meaning, most people don't have it figured out.
So what, dude who suddenly fell into massive wealth tried a bunch of cliched things to find meaning. Did they work? No, these types of cliched things usually don't. However you don't find meaning without trying things. You have to fail before you suceed.
But both of you can be right. I would not judge the author for their attempt to find meaning but it is hard to read something like "all coworkers are NPCs" and dehumanizing expressions like that.
No, your coworkers are complex human beings with complex lives of their own seeking stability and a content life for themselves and their families. Blaming people for not always maximum pushing and risk taking is very simple minded. It is fine to enjoy a content, stable life without aiming for the stars all the time. It doesn't block you from being a star seeker yourself.
Responsibly raising a family is a massive and tiring task on its own but of course you can take the easy way out like Elon and delegate "family" to others starting at insemination because you burned your brain with drugs and had too many conversations with Peter Thiel. Most people don't want that.
And when he mentioned DOGE it was an immediate red flag. These people do not care why or for what purpose governments exist. They only see the inefficiencies and blockers and fail to understand that governments are not profit oriented companies. This is pretty much like failing pre-school. These folks belong in emotional special needs schools.
> but it is hard to read something like "all coworkers are NPCs" and dehumanizing expressions like that.
They did not say that all coworkers are NPCs.
What they said is "I knew that staying at the acquiring company was not it for me for the big company reasons you might suspect (lots of politics, things moved slowly, NPC coworkers, etc.)".
You should read that as "in a big company, there are more coworkers who don't do anything useful" rather than "at a big company, nobody is doing anything useful".
I read it more as - in a big company there are a lot of people there just to get a paycheque who don't really care.
Which isn't really surprising. That is kind of what a job is. Company gives you money in exchange for them telling you what to do for a little while. There is a very real way where "becoming an npc" for 8 hours a day is what it means to be employed for a lot of people. That is not a dig at the person; we all need to do what we need to do to put food on the table.
It would be interesting to learn what a bunch of people actually do with found wealth.
I've read that lottery winners frequently become seriously unhappy.
Maybe some of us aren't ultra-rich like this guy, but we might deal with some of the same existential issues either planning or encountering retirement.
My intuition is that (sudden) wealth causes some amount of additional isolation (for different reasons: jealousy, privacy, security, etc), so if you are not someone with preexisting social bonds that are strong enough to weather that change, you’re going to ultimately feel emotionally worse off once the quick pleasure hits start to fade. If you’re someone going into that situation without strong social bonds, you end up even further isolated.
I also thought about lottery winners. I wonder if this guy will end up like the Minecraft creator.
Yeah that comment just reads like someone who is pointing down at how unenlightened someone is, when that someone just finished telling you that they don't know what they are doing and being honest about it.
Would it be so much better for the author to hide this phase of personal growth, and then later on comment on other people's struggles to mock how far they are from them?