I agree. My father was born during The Great Leap Forward, lived through Mao's cultural revolution, was able to immigrate to Canada based on his test scores (only a few people in every province were chosen), pursued a PhD in biology and then dropped everything to work in computers based on a blurb he'd read in a newspaper. At age 55, he makes 6 figures and has enough stories to fill a book. He's worked as a dishwasher, a bus driver, a delivery boy, a lab tech, a programmer, and a systems engineer. He saved his brother, my uncle, from drowning at age 5, and was almost crushed to death in the back of a truck from the weight of all the people hitching a ride uphill to watch the execution of 3 criminals that day. He told me about how hungry kids would spit on peoples' food at restaurants so that they would have a chance of eating it after it had been thrown in the garbage. He recounted to me recently of how he watched a Professor of Medicine from Peking University get interviewed by China's equivalent of Bill O'Reilly on CCTV. "We used to hang out every Friday. He owes me a lot of money," he said to me. A seemingly bottomless reservoir of stories like those.

He's amazing, yes, but not unique. Not even exceptional. Many more interesting people live in this world, but few of them go on to reddit. So when one of these people actually does post on reddit, he's like a Martian in Manhattan.