Have been reading Hacker News for many years, and feel like this kind of headline is quite common from the HN/SV bubble. Paul Graham writes like this too. It’s the language of a software tutorial for novices, applied to life. It’s this shift that makes it feel so pretentious! As a reader it’s fine to accept being a novice reading expert advice, when the subject is a computer program. When the subject is life choices, a writer would normally adopt a more humble tone, since most readers would need to be convinced that someone had all that more expertise than themselves. At the same time, I find it slightly endearing in its naivety, because these subjects being too complicated to capture in simple rules doesn’t stop the authors from trying.