It's just a profile piece. It's not hard journalism nor is it trying to be. It's just a little picture of the life of a mildly interesting person. If you like, great. If you don't, you don't have to read it.
That's not great advice considering I have to read it in order to determine if I like it.
I'm just not sure this article belongs on hacker "news", because it is not "news"
Not necessarily, it could be that only 40 people in a population of hundreds of thousands enjoyed the article, but only one of those others felt the need to point it out (against the HN guidelines).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Note that the intellectual curiosity doesn't have to be universal. The upvote system is in place to determine what is sufficiently interesting to reach a given place in the rankings.