To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.

You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.

Downsizing your house? Picking your long term care location? Changing your asset balance? Recording more photos, audio, and video?

Knowing an early, painful fate allows you to approach it with dignity.

Okay but even that analogy is limited. Incurable progressive diseases almost invariably have lifestyle factors, supplements, or medications that can at least slow the rate of progression for many people. Those are also often more effective when started during early stage detection. There is literally nothing the average person can do about the asteroid.