Enjoying Life - Page 5

no good can come of further educating the French. congratulations on the promotion mate.

No one is saying you can't, say, save a certain % of your salary for retirement/whatever. What I am criticizing is the tremendous societal pressure towards attaining certain things at a certain age and in a certain order; a prescriptive view of life as a series of notches on the yardstick of success. I happen to think it brings more anguish than it solves problems, YMMV.

nvm

I tend to agree.

I am sure you've often wondered how easy it would have been to marry your wife (belonging to another race) 40 yrs ago or how you would have been viewed by your community and peers as a married man of 40 with no children of his own.

It exists for a reason though, and not just retirement. Most people want to get married and have kids. That costs money. I don't think anyone wants to raise kids in poverty. If you want to have kids at a reasonable age, that requires that you bust your ass when you're young, so that when you're a little older, you're stable enough to take on the extra financial burden that kids and family represent. If instead of working hard you screw around and have fun, you could put yourself in a situation that makes further career advancement very difficult when you need to start earning more money. I see this all the time in IT. Tons of people have certification goals they never attain because they didn't work hard enough when they had the free time, and now that they have kids and families, they can't put aside the time to study. It's also cause they are slackers and many don't have the aptitude, but home life interference is a real part of it as well, I think. The thing is, if you miss the first notch, the second becomes much harder to attain, and on and on. The private sector is unforgiving. If someone looks at your resume and sees that you haven't done X, and all your peers have, it looks bad and it becomes that much harder to compete. This is true for things like banking and law too. If you miss the boat for summer internships, things get a LOT harder for you. With the way the world is changing, most driven people realize how important it is to hit those milestones by a certain age, otherwise they'll be left in the dust and unemployed (or employed at starbucks). I can't answer for others, but for me, the sacrifices I've made have been worth it. Was I absolutely drained at times when I was doing 80-100hr weeks and trying to go to school? Yes, but already I am better off than most of my peers and I will be even more ahead in the future. And if I had stuck to the prescriptive path which you so abhor when i was a tad younger, I wouldn't have even had to endure that pain. It was mostly self-inflicted from spending too much time fucking around on non-productive things.

You played too much D&D. Not everyone needs a precise gameplan to accumulate satisfying life experiences, contacts and a measure of financial security. BTW you keep bringing it back to money and some sort of job thing while what I was discussing is def not particularly focussed on that.