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Notes -
An important missing element in your description is that you need to be doing things that are hard but that you can actually succeed in. The "work hard" --> "achieve something you couldn't have without the hard work" cycle is important. Whether it's for literal basic survival or for some "surrogate" activity as he calls them seems a little bit less important to me.
A lot of the ennui plaguing people in modern society seems like it stems from everything either being trivially easy to get or completely unobtainable regardless of effort, so there's not much left that can fit into the power process. Technology has moved a lot of the "you have to work hard for it" things like food and shelter into the "trivially easy" category. We're left with "become a celebrity," "become a billionaire," etc., which require a ton of luck and grinding will only get you so far.
Interesting thesis. Perhaps this is part of why some people find things like kids, homeownership, getting degrees, getting promoted at work as meaningful, since those all fit in between "easy" and "almost impossible".
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