Thanks for sharing your thoughts on UX, I appreciate the effort to understand and do better, especially coming from (I assume) a technical environment.

There's a great book about Metaphors We Live By written by G. Lakoff & M. Johnson. It explains how metaphors, created as a consequence of our cultural behaviors and experiences, are reused in multiple fields and contexts to simplify the understanding of more abstract ideas -like time, work, and feelings- we usually put into boxes and categorize.