My "is" is. It is NOT your "ought": Smokejumpers, like mountain climbers, are a rare animal. No one "ought" to follow their lead. You have to fight to be one. You have no right to be one. No one does. The calling verges on insanity. To take it up and survive requires sanity.
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One can have a tendency or even a need to project outwards "the peculiarity of one's own personality."(Freud, 1912) One can easily mistake one's own "is" for another person's "ought". Some callings and disciplines do not lend themselves so easily to that mistake.
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Arriving at a place in which you can be yourself, in which you allow others to be as they are, different from you, is a fine thing. It is neither heroic nor noble, however. It may, nonetheless, lend you a certain generosity of spirit and a general good humor.
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And the funny as well as fine point of this rumination is exactly not that you "should" do anything. Whatever you choose to do will have an "ought" to it, as will your own reality. But, the general and vague "oughtism" that plagues people in their insecurity is not your business.
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And people will do it. You will be "should upon". Outside of your obligations, whatever they may be, another person's oughts and shoulds may be theirs and theirs alone. They are welcome to them. And you can as easily allow someone to attempt to inflict "oughtism" upon you.
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If you have been graced with or suffered a calling or a personality that is rare or demanding, it may be that you have arrived at such freedom from comparison, from imitation. From that vantage, to look out at the world and to be curious about other people is another adventure.
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"Wow, this funny person really needs me to sign up with their beliefs, to share in their outrage, to do as they do, and to think as they do. They must imagine that everyone is just like them."
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Freud suggested that analysis could help doctors not "fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of [their] own personality" when working with people. It may.
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True heroism, Nietzsche says, consists 'in not fighting at all [with other people over your choices]. "This is what I am; this is what I want:- you can go to hell!"', He said. It does not even need a language of heroism. Nor does it need to provoke others. It may or may not.
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This was one hell of a thread and also, through some serendipity, exactly what I needed to hear at this moment. Thank you.