Yeah, my point is exactly that although it is clear at a language level, the terminology shift can be quite important for whether you end up with a thought process that's healthy vs entangled with anxiety. If you don't believe that -- perhaps you haven't dealt with a lot of anxiety in your life?

I've dealt with plenty of anxiety. Talk therapy is great.

If somebody's anxiety prevents them from connecting to the article because the author refers to themselves as "a baby" instead of "like a baby", that person may benefit from talk therapy.

As an outsider, I think the conversation went off the rails here when you assumed the OP wasn't "going to connect with the article" based on their comment. This is now the 2nd time w/o reason you're implying that, whereas the OP is talking about general implications of the word choice (on the author and on people in general, not on people's emotional state while reading it).

Why do you think it's "blindingly clear"? If you're going to use such strong language, it should be easy to present your argument in a more convincing way. Others disagree with you - I think calling them wrong without so much as a single line to suggest why is very much "being a baby". You think others should just agree with you because it's what YOU think - my five year old niece seems to think this way as well.

The person I'm responding to acknowledges that "is a" & "acts like a" are equivalent in the context of the article.

If somebody is getting hung up on something as nit-picky as that, they're not going to see the forest for the trees in an article like this.

Ironically, playing nit-picky semantics games like this is the kind of avoidant attitude that lead people astray from personal growth.

I think you're both right:

* someone reacting strongly to this slight difference is "acting like a baby", at least colloquially, but I'm not sure if it meets the author's definition of "active".

* the author using the term "acting like a baby" might get through to people who are sensitive to the difference