Thank you for writing this. Not gonna cry for this guy, he clearly appears to be a POS who happened to sell a screen recording software company at an obscene price.

Same with Musk, same with Zuckerberg, these entitled twats then use their money to try and convince the world that they are enlightened prophets, all while contributing nothing to the happiness and beauty of the world.

Musk has contributed towards a more sustainable future with electric cars, fueled the dream of being an interplanetary species with reusable rockets, and defended free speech in the western world via Twitter.

I’ve long been of the opinion that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Between the NPC comment and breaking up with his girlfriend, I’d say he has a long way to go, if he ever gets there at all. Hope he does.

Hard to stomach but you can't deny honesty. I wouldn't be surprised that more business high brass people think that way about the workers but are smart enough not to be open about it.

Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.

How about, "through loving others, you find a reason to love yourself?"

Thankyou. It's a relief to know that other people share my opinion after reading this appalling article.

The author is too dumb to even effectively disguise the extent to which he is just showing off throughout the article.

I suppose the fact that Musk is his idol sums it up.

There's a lot of anger at this choice in wording here, but it seems very clear to me his mindset. He lacks empathy. There's a scale from sociopath to "I need to sit on all the cushions in my house an equal amount of time so they don't get sad", and it's clear he's further to one end.

If you can't empathise with someone and understand (to some extent) their world view, it would be very easy to see them as alien, programmed NPCs. Not everyone can easily train their empathy muscle.

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.