It's a cautionary piece about the price of obsession - you can make the greatest niche thing in the world - but without others who share your passion, or passing that passion on, it often comes for naught.
The fact that the stereo is separated in the end does not conclusively mean that it was all for naught. To glibly boil down the aftermath post, what about "the journey and the people you met along the way"? He was enmeshed in a community of like-minded hobbyists. None of them were able to take the entire behemoth system as a unit, but he seems to have made a lot of fellow hobbyist obsessives happy with pieces.
On the "people" aspect, the family story can be hugely significant. But Fritz doesn't seem to have alienated anyone except one son, and the story itself seems to resolve to he-said, he-said on that relationship.
> The fact that the stereo is separated in the end does not conclusively mean that it was all for naught.
Of course. Much was achieved and that included systemic harm to those around him.
He was a man who never understood that he was prioritizing things and accomplishments over people. I suspect empathy didn't factor into the calculations in his head.
I'm not damning him here. Having been him to a degree, I can testify the distance to working empathy isn't trivial. It gets crossed with a great deal of time and difficulty. Further, I see signs of pronounced OCD which may complicate his challenges in ways I may not understand.
These things are good to understand. So is the harm he brought to people who trusted him.
>He was a man who never understood that he was prioritizing things and accomplishments over people. I suspect empathy didn't factor into the calculations in his head.
Perfectly put, but this happens more frequently than you think.
My father is pretty much like Fritz but without the audio obsession. He's now in his 60's and his whole life he only cared about making money an being busy all the time with work.
Everytime I ask my father how he is he will always reply how well his business is going. I wasn't surprised by the following quote from the article because it's exactly how people like him are:
>A hard-driving boss at his company, he brought the same energy to his after-hours hobby, which he sometimes seemed to think of as everybody’s hobby.
Well, yeah, there are a lot of people who neglect friends and family for some kind of obsession - some write books, paint, create music, write software that outlives them to some degree or at least improves or inspires the lives of many other people. This guy spent his limited free time (and that of his family) building his dream stereo system, finished it when he was about to turn 80 and didn't have a lot of time left to enjoy it, and after his death his life's work was sold off bit by bit for far less than he invested in it (financially, not even mentioning the countless hours). So, to me, it's a cautionary tale to be wise about how to spend your time...
