For Some Men, Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lifestyle Guru | Hacker News Reader

For Some Men, Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lifestyle Guru

nytimes.com

11 pointsdnetesn6 comments

What's Facebook's contribution to mankind?

The farther we skid along into a fin-de-bubble era, the more tech articles read like something out of GQ or Maxim. In addition to the above, we also have, for example:

Nadler, who is 32, spent the rest of the morning checking in with some of the bank’s most regular Kensho users — a top executive on the options-and-derivatives-trading desks, a fund manager — then took an Uber down for a lunch meeting at Goldman’s glass tower just off the West Side Highway in Manhattan. While almost everyone in the building dresses in neatly pressed work attire, Nadler rarely deviates from his standard outfit: Louis Vuitton leather sandals and a casual but well-cut T-shirt and pants, both by the designer Alexander Wang. Nadler owns 10 of these.

Memo to wannabe alpha geeks: you now have more options besides back turtlenecks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-co...

That is not what I got from the article at all. It's about people being inspired to live a fuller life by someone they look up to. Setting time aside for reflection, self-improvement, and giving back.

Except they can also find qualities like that in people they directly know, can't they?

They don't have to model themselves after billionaires.

This is a very cynical view to take. Much of your life is shaped by emulating people you have never known directly. And for the better.

Every time you read a book, you're engaging in a dialogue with someone you have likely never known personally. Be it the author, or the characters of fictional works.

Your heroes span time and space, find them everywhere, even among billionaires.

You're right, perhaps I've allowed myself to become a bit cynical. I just tend to think that, rather than "heroic" figures our society has awarded outsize rewards (i.e. stupendously humungous amounts of money and/or recognition) we'd be better off looking for "heroic" qualities in people already around us -- and who may be serving in roles far less glamorous: teachers, social workers, parents... or the guy in the next cube, even.

You know, in the spirit of the:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

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