Is it fair to expect someone in his position to have perspective?
I think if you ask him about the failure six months or a year later, a resilient person would be able to put it in perspective, but not while it's happening.
I don't know, because we're not talking about a specific person. But the entity that I know only from reading this article, the one sitting on a desk picking at his company's vanity sticker and thinking that nobody in the world can know how he feels, I think he could use a little perspective.
It is exactly clear to me how unhappy this sentiment makes startup people on HN, and that's fine. I take no offense.
The point is that this line of reasoning can be applied to whatever painful event suffered by anybody who's better than "most people" and especially gasp "most Americans."
Where do you draw the line and why there and not elsewhere? What's "proper pain"?
To be honest, I'm somewhat on your side and tend to take the "shut up and grow up already" mentality regarding people whining (suffering) about painful life events, but that view does not answer the above question reasonably, it just ends up denouncing whatever you personally cannot withstand or are annoyed with.
True. "Nobody can understand this pain" is either self evidently false (at the very least other indebted, divorced start up founders understand it and likely many other people who are worse off) or a tautology (everybody suffers differently and thus nobody can understand the pain of anybody else.)
I personally don't get worked up about that kind of self commiserating sentences.
Is it fair to expect someone in his position to have perspective?
I think if you ask him about the failure six months or a year later, a resilient person would be able to put it in perspective, but not while it's happening.