[fizzledbits]

> “I think the downvotes (that's what gray means right?) are people's way of saying that the personal narrative that defines your life is so boring that your job is the only place you can achieve feelings like that. I feel bad for you so won't downvote.“

Okay... Maybe it came out not as intended, or maybe I misinterpreted it, but this statement shocked me with its (in my interpretation) condescension. “So boring”, ”I feel bad for you,” being I suppose the key phrases. What I had recalled was my own former inferiority complex, of which I believed I saw an echo in your post and many others’ responses. It no longer occurs to me to feel offense (as in many other comments) or pity (as in yours) when someone else speaks in a competitive tone of a singleminded desire to “win,” whatever winning happens to mean to them, and I now regard such reactions as irrational and egocentric, whatever internal mechanism they arise from. To illustrate, I’d predict many of the commenters would to varying degrees celebrate an athlete expressing himself in a similar manner (the most famous example I guess being Muhammad Ali, but there are many other such personalities in individual and team sports), and I believe that is primarily because athletes are in a profession they don’t identify with and therefore cannot locate any basis on which to feel either psychologically threatened or in any other way contrast with their own choices. But I may still be missing nuance in your individual comment.

Both the OC and your assumption that he is “handing [his] life over to the guy [he] works for” seem to me to be speaking pretty squarely of the popular notion of work-life balance. Perhaps I’m again missing some nuance there.

Anyhow, it’s not important. Hope you have a nice week.