Most people are just... there. They float towards one incentive to another. Get good grades because mom yells at me for not getting good grades. Get a job because bills. Marry someone good at sex and finance. Get more education because it's easier than caring about work. Buy expensive thing so people will like me.

A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.

What if they were molested and use drugs to cope, but live their entire life without molesting anyone else? Would that be success?

What if they have serious depression and they check out by playing video games, but they don't kill themselves? Would that be success?

Holding up a few spectacular achievements as the paragon of human experience is fucking stupid.

I genuinely think really rich (and smart) people do it to try to salve their guilt and signal for others.

If you think you're working towards something good: a family, home ownership, kids, a reasonable amount of life enjoyment in terms of leisure, a stable society, and a pleasant retirement where you can enjoy seeing your grandkids and participate in some hobbies for a decade or so before your mind or body collapse....you might be willing to push yourself to achieve as much as you possibly can, even if you're a lowly cashier or janitor.

But who wants to go the extra mile for this degenerate and hopeless society where your money is being destroyed and you have grave concerns about many things? Whether rightly or wrongly, everybody is seeing fucked up things in the world and many people are feeling much greater concern about the future than we've ever seen before. This isn't a recipe for going the extra mile at work or harnessing the energy of society to achieve something great.

I find no value in the hero worship myself. I find the notion of getting all excited because (name of person) said something kind of offensive.

Hard work and genetics aren't nearly enough. Saying "luck" doesn't even describe it either.

We often ignore the social element - the people that helped along the way, the parents that supported them dropping out of college, the professor or teacher that took a particular interest in them. When we do talk about it, it seems the usual message is "they were kind of an asshole"(e.g. Jobs).

We ignore the emotional element even more. I don't mean "they failed 3 times but their 4th startup was amazing, keep trying!". I mean the headspace that lets them do that. The little thing that lets Woz show his computer to Jobs and not just say "oh, it's a stupid little toy, meh". There are tons of setbacks in life for everyone, and it's not fair to say "well, they kept trying!" Things made that possible.

As you said, motivation is supremely important. If you get rewarded and acknowledged for playing with things, then you will. If you're struggling to find your identity and your parents want you to get a "real job", well...

I say this because the people I know who have died from, or have alcohol problems, are (or were) pretty well off financially. I know that’s not typical, but being upper or upper-middle class doesn’t seem to matter in my experience.

That may be your own personal motivation, but it is far from a generalization or even shared by many people.

For instance, people do work to make a living. For some people, making a living means paying the rent and put food on the table. For others, it means affording luxuries and materialist goals. Most people do need to work to cover these expenses, and the higher they cost the harder they need to work for them. This is the norm.

Then there are also other motivations. Some people decide to become entrepreneurs not because they seek riches, but because they believe they are able to create something new, something that no one else can provide, and believe that they have an obligation to be a source of progress and push the world forward in their own personal way.

I'm not saying 100%, but playing with that idea. If you grow up your whole life on stories of teens making millions and you're a loser if you don't. What else is there for you?

I grew up that making bank like that was rare. Super rare. You work for it. Some way, some how. Through connections or through ideas. But it's not "normal". Thus, don't think it is. It does seem on social media and the filth, that being stupid rich is normal and you're a loser if you're not.

I can understand that if you grow up seeing that, a majority of your developing life... yea... I'd probably have a mental breakdown too. What else is there? You think, well, your life is over. It's too late to "become rich" or important.

In some respects, the hipster movement is a slightly interesting counter culture to that problem. Looking back to the old ways. I think they take it too far and are dumb about it sometimes. But, at this moment while writing this, I can respect it. What we have now is not normal. It's easy to deal with if you remember a day when no one had cell phones. You ran around outside doing dumbshit. No one cried if you called them an asshole, they just hit you in the mouth and the day was done. Hell, if I had a kid in school now, I'd be scared that they might call someone a boy or girl and end up on the news because of it. That's an irrational fear on my own right. But, yea, I seem to have it.

I don't know. I don't feel like this is well thought out. It's just a weird thing that I understand that there is an inherent problem with people growing up nowadays and mental illness is a bad result of it. Exactly what, I don't know.

For example, in my social group, who as you can imagine are a bunch of well-off privileged people, there is a small but persistent minority of people who complain about ills that plague less privileged people as if they affected them, too. They aren't a minority of the most selfish people; they might be a pious bunch but they're mostly just not thinking.

So I hear complaints about anxiety over employment, from people with Ivy League degrees who could have ten interviews for higher pay lined up within 48 hours if they wanted. And not just acknowledgment of the emotions that everybody feels regardless of privilege, but explicitly linking their anxiety to real economic precarity and political and policy injustices.

Complaints about how difficult it is to pay for health care, from people who have 1% incomes and walk out of a complex surgery owing a few hundred bucks. That's not the health care crisis that people are talking about!

Complaints about exploitative employment, from salaried people who can and do take a few days off whenever they want, for whatever reason they want, and can disappear from work anytime, no matter how awkward the timing, with no questions asked by saying the words "mental health."

These people aren't consciously lying, but they aren't thinking concretely enough to realize that people aren't going to validate and applaud their words like they would if they came out of the mouth of someone less privileged.

I tell them that if privileged people exploit the sensitivity to mental health in the workplace to such a ridiculous degree, there might be a backlash against it before some people even begin to see the benefits. And if people learn to associate "health care crisis" and "food islands" with wealthy people complaining about nearly imperceptible lifestyle compromises, it's going to make it much harder to make progress politically.

But they don't get it. They aren't thinking below the surface. They're just thinking "people sympathize with and applaud these kinds of complaints so I should voice them as well."

What's depressing is how often people don't think of other people.

It reminds me that we're all people, all human.

Also reminds me of a bible verse (Ecclesiastes 9:10): "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

Whether rich or poor, happy or not, we all die.

However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.

Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.