Why do we still give a shit how someone chooses to spend their free time? Why can't you be successful and partake in drunken S&M orgies at 3 am? As long as it's between consenting adults, I don't see why it should somehow tarnish your character.

I despise this "soccer-mom-approved" bullshit where the only acceptable free time activity is attending a little league baseball game or organizing a church picnic.

Would Einstein's work somehow be diminished if it came out that he liked to experiment with mushrooms?

I was really hoping that we'd have stopped judging people on these criteria by now. So disappointing that we haven't.

I don't think most people care about successful people partaking in drunken S&M orgies at 3 AM - at least, I don't. What I care about are the people who use their success, status, and position in a company to make other people feel like they also need to be a part of their drunken 3 AM debauchery. Or else face consequences.

I didn't get the impression from Ellen's account that the major problem was the fact that Ajit was cheating on his wife or lying to Ellen about it (although that in itself is not morally OK); the major problem was after she rebuffed him, the backlash that she faced due to his position of power within the company and community at large.

Uhmm you make a reasonable argument but I am not sure why it's a reply to my comment. I was commenting on peoples behavior in the workplace and not how they spend their free time. Did you just inadvertently create a strawman so you could attack it?

You see I like many people here aspire to be successful but neither do I have the personality to for example play dominance games nor the desire to develop such a personality and hence I wonder if that's something that might truly handicap one or just something that imposters do.

That's not the point. But it might tell something about the mentality and the psychology of a category of people, if they are more prone to such 'hobbies' than other categories.

I have a feeling we by now have way too much "tell something about the mentality" things. People seek most minute and irrelevant details about somebody's life and blow them up into the whole narrative about how it reveals the darkest depths of somebody's psychology, all while ignoring the open history of behavior, speech, accomplishments and so on. The idea that all the observable behavior is just a facade and only this one or two particular details about something that was said or done once 20 years ago reveals somebody's "true character" is bewildering in its irrationality, and still seems to be widely popular.

It's projection. Not the "I'm ascribing my attitudes to the other" flavor of projection that most people think of. It's the kind that makes someone go "Oh, of course this other has this set of attributes that make them exactly the kind of person I already have a stereotype for and opinion of."

Secondly, there are people that spend a great deal of mental effort concealing what they consider to be their "true personality." Whether or not that is in reality who they are is tangential to the point that concealment becomes a big part of their life, and they start assuming others do it to. Or if someone was burned by a person that practices concealment, they'll be on guard for it. And that is again tangential to either's _ability_ to read a concealed aspect of another, which are often no closer than the projection described above.