Comment by arkensaw
2 months ago
It reminds me of the Sheeple comic from xkcd. It's common for people to fall into the mental pattern of thinking everyone else is a mindless drone.
Our brains are not evolved for the scale of human civilisation. The mind rebels trying to accept that 8 billion people have as much going on (or more) than you do.
"NPC coworkers" is a provocative way of phrasing it, but yesterday I saw another HN commenter say "We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value". This is mostly the same mindset.
I disagree completely with the implication of last paragraph. For one thing, if an employee has only busywork to do, that is the fault of the elites running the company, not the employee.
To jump from "managers don't know how to allocate tasks" to "the employee being managed is an unthinking, fungible automaton" is enormous.
The disdain of this shithead toward coworkers is misplaced. He accuses his coworkers who are being mismanaged of being NPCs when it's more apt to accuse the managers of being bad "game designers," to carry the analogy further.
It's also a weird analogy to make in 2025, when co-op games exist. What mental deficiency, what arrogance must you suffer from to analogize coworkers to pre-programmed non-humans when actual humans play the games with you these days?
Edit: His entire line of thinking reminds me so much of the stupid geeks in high school who looked at athletically-gifted classmates and said "they aren't deep like I am." Give me a break. The shallow ones are the ones incapable of identifying the spark of the divine in people different from themselves.
we're reading a lot into a two word phrase. NPC coworkers could mean a lot of things. For instance, in a world of gamers, it could just mean none of them are on an actual quest and only have menial tasks.
it so easy to misinterpret text, ask any religion
Exactly this. I’m of the option that you have to spend at least a couple of hours in deep conversation with most people in order to even think about calling them an asshole, despite them writing what to you feels like obnoxious texts. It’s not intellectually honest to throw around the asshole judgement whenever you read a sentence that upsets you.