I appreciate you sharing this; it was sweet. But there's something disturbing in the way you're framing it.

Have we lost perspective to the point where even the basic notions of how to live one's life have to be seen through the lens of a hacker working on a startup?

I say this as a hacker, working on a startup. When I'm done with my IE7 hacks, and I figure out why my production server isn't behaving like my dev server, I might take a moment to re-read that article and play some Queen, so I can fix my mind's eye on that beautiful human being who died too young.