[mattgreenrocks]

This is insightful.

Would the author do these things absent the post-hoc moralizing?

Maybe we are seeing what it looks like when we concoct narratives to order our life, and it hits a bit too close to home. After all, how coincidental is it that the thing that brings ultimate fulfillment (career) is also the thing that we’ve been told all our life to put so much into.

[kodah]

I'm not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I tend to agree with you. I might expand this farther than work though. You can find this any human activity that has very passionate people: religion, politics, self-help, tech (apparently). Ultimately, humans are susceptible to posturing ourselves compared to our peers. To me, the byproduct is morality of which a major component is judgement.