I almost want to say amen, oh hold on I did say it.

So well stated.THank you.

Superficially at least that seems to have been Bourdain's problem, but then neither was he the stereotype of a money and status whore. He was, by all accounts, a humble, kind, approachable person with a genuine curiosity about the world and others. The "tell" for me is that his mother was interviewed and expressed confusion about why he killed himself because he "had everything" including "money beyond his wildest dreams". So I'm guessing that for him it was probably a double whammy: raised thinking success, accolades and $$ were all one needed to be happy, but smart enough to know better, but suffering from impostor syndrome as well (based on his fairly plentiful statements of the "I'm not worthy of all this attention" variety, as well as the fact he was a workaholic and so clearly never felt much sense of actual achievement such that he could rest from it now and then). Coupled with perfectionism.

I agree that one does not want to be merely a reactor to life, however, you have to take life as it is and flex with it. In that sense, being "a person who reacts to life" is kind of a necessity. I would say, you need to be one who flexes with reality, rather than demanding that reality conform to your expectations.

I tend to regard "creating your life" or "creating your reality", stated without qualification or elaboration, as some derivative of hermeticism, "as above, so below" woo, the foundation of many bad things in the world including dominionism / prosperity gospel within Christianity. In practice, in my experience, the connection between effort and intention on the one hand, and outcomes on the other, is flaky at best, so I'm loathe to shame others into taking blame for all their problems being self-inflicted -- which is the "logical" endpoint of such a notion. What we DO control is our emotional and attitudinal handling of things that happen to us.

Energy in it's proper form though, for the good of the Earth.

Or is it?
Leisure can be defined as time you are doing things by choice.
Therefore leisure is the time of your life available to you. It is the coin which enters into your every action, and so is a measure of your every value.