One of these days I'm just going to snap and go full "elitism is good actually".

Maybe elitism is good but the problem is that we need a better class of elitist.

The specific prompt for this was someone going "But mah work-life balance" in response to an article about how hard people were working on the COVID-19 vaccine and... maybe they're just better than you?

I'm afraid when people are dealing with an ongoing and urgent global problem at the cutting edge of their expertise, they're going to work quite hard. You don't have to do that, because your work doesn't actually matter in comparison, and that's fine.

This is a problem that pulls in both directions: It is unfair to expect normal people to work like those who are top at expertise/work/life alignment to work like normal people, but it is civilisation-endingly stupid to expect the reverse too.