This story about alignment reminds of past discussions about stress and status. There's the infamous Whitehall study and Sapolsky's research linking perception

This story about alignment reminds of past discussions about stress and status. There's the infamous Whitehall study and Sapolsky's research linking perception of status as the driver of stress in workers rather than the effort expended at work. In a sense, people who are aligned have a completely different relationship towards work to the point where it probably can't be considered the same thing. I don't mean that just sociologically, but physically and physiologically in terms of the long term costs to their bodies and minds as well. I may be misremembering the exact argument, but some insightful commenter here once mentioned a while ago that although Hannibal Barca would in all likelihood have had a stressful life, his relationship to that stress would probably be much different from what we imagine due to our perspective as worker bees whose relationship to work isn't defined by autonomy, glory, or decisions that really have an impact. When I see Altman's quote: >It's not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US.... I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. It strikes me that for a person to be confused by this, they would have to be completely isolated from the working reality of most people. I'm not familiar with Altman's life, but if I had to guess he was never in a position where the long-term connection between effort and gaining autonomy/mastery/meaning was broken.