1) much of the reason it’s grueling and unpleasant is that it’s a social tournament, with success being predicated on convincing people that you’re successful. This naturally encourages participants to play up the benefits and downplay the costs to outsiders (and each other, and themselves).
2) It’s not as evenly distributed as the well-known difficult jobs—there are pretty good middle-management positions that can easily be found as examples to attract suckers to play your game.
I suspect that by the time someone notices they’ve been baited-and-switched by #2, they’ve invested enough in #1 that they start to believe it can’t get better.
Two reasons come to mind:
1) much of the reason it’s grueling and unpleasant is that it’s a social tournament, with success being predicated on convincing people that you’re successful. This naturally encourages participants to play up the benefits and downplay the costs to outsiders (and each other, and themselves).
2) It’s not as evenly distributed as the well-known difficult jobs—there are pretty good middle-management positions that can easily be found as examples to attract suckers to play your game.
I suspect that by the time someone notices they’ve been baited-and-switched by #2, they’ve invested enough in #1 that they start to believe it can’t get better.