alt Hacker NewsI have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.
Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours.
Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.