NPCs don’t actually exist outside of video games, those are real human beings.
Not sure what to do with all that wealth? Try asking one of those NPCs… spend a day with each one of them, learn what being human actually is
He sounds pretty full of himself and seems to struggle making personal connections with people. Being the founder of a startup gave people a reason to care about him, and now that he's lost that along everyone around him. He beat the game and now the characters in the story have nothing left to say to him.
The guy should put down the physics book and go learn to be a person that others enjoy being around. Go get a job waiting tables and hang out with coworkers after work, learn to surf, etc.
I'm sure they are lovely people outside work, and loving parents and good citizens. But when the rest of us are busting our butts to get work done, they're unfortunately useless.
He's calling them filler, basically
This whole mindset has got to go. You and OP going around like this, it's gross for the world and it's a bad look on you.
If everyone matters the same, no one matters.
Nobody's saying everyone is of equal value, they're saying that reducing your perception of somebody into a 2-dimensional caricature because you don't perceive value in them is the type of disgusting mental habit of somebody who either has no real friends or soon will have none.
If so, you reduced them into a caricature, and you should have instead said "that guy behaved in the manner of an asshole, though I trust that he is otherwise a fully-actualized individual with a life of his own, and with factors outside my visibility that impact his decisions and behaviors."
Also, it's not apples and oranges comparing a spoken remark in the heat of the moment to a thoughtful, written out blog post.
Fundamental attribution error strikes again?
Reminds me of the apocryphal/anecdotal tale of the management conultant who wanted to fire a "secretary" who he could only find taking coffee breaks and long lunches with lots of different people, only to be told (or finding out after the firing) that the person in question was critical to inter-team dynamics and functioning.
You get some leeches in there. You get some jerks. They’re the exception, not the rule, even in ur big globocorps.
cf. Mean Girls
More generally, if you cultivate yourself you will get more pleasure from your activities. If you take time to learn an instrument, or listen to classical, or gardening (you can grow exotic plants for example), learn a new language, or anything else. The more you put into refining your appreciation and knowledge, the more value you can get back from your activities. It's a self cultivation problem.
You're engaging in the exact same behavior, are you not? NPC and soulless are the same fundamental concept, that there is a certain threshold of humanity people can fall below to be considered lesser. They're soulless, they're NPCs, they're untermenschen... whatever the word for it, there are "dead giveaways" that a person can lack that hidden quality that separates man from animal. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but from a certain reading, it seems like what you're saying isn't really all that far off from "calls people NPCs = is the real NPC".
I often see people decry specific terminology associated with dehumanizing beliefs without refuting the actual premise behind them.
Soulless was just a heavy handing way of saying it demonstrates a disturbing lack of empathy. Whether or not souls exist is debatable in the first place, so no I wouldn’t equate it with calling someone subhuman.