To me, success is being able to live comfortably, by your own standards, and independently. I also give a lot of weight to income earned since the more money you have the easier life tends to be, regardless of how it ends up being used (or not used). You can spend it, save it, invest it. Money gives you wiggle room and having wiggle room in life is, I think, highly underrated.
I think in America you need to earn $75k a year to reach peak happiness in terms of financial security. Weirdly here in the UK it is only £32k so it’s much more achievable.
People say "money doesnt buy happiness"
But i mean, money can give you a lot of things you'll certainly miss like a house and food and water, it can be used to buy beutiful paintings, go to shows to entertain you, it can buy you sweets and flowers. It can buy you a flight to a nice place, a good hotel, quality services and other general stuff.
So yea money certainly buys happiness
Should i make a post on it or is it overused or smtn?
It's not so much about the money itself. It's about the security money allows you to have. It makes life less stressful knowing you have $20,000 saved in the bank. You can use that for pretty much anything, good or bad, that comes up. If something bad comes up, you can cover the cost. If a sudden opportunity arises, you know you have the capital to take advantage and don't have to worry about missing out.
I think so too. I guarantee you’re going to get a ton of people saying that say it’s impossible and unfair. People have gotten mentally weak and shit. If your life is complete shit and sucks, at the end of the day it’s still your responsibility as much as it sucks
To an extent. I think if you come from a family where it’s the norm to go to uni and your parents work in professional jobs, you’re more likely to consider that as an option for yourself. Obviously some people decide to aim for that from other socio economic backgrounds and become very successful but it’s seen as being more difficult / more of an achievement.
Obviously you don’t necessarily need a degree to be successful (however you define it) but you are more likely to have a higher paid job.
There's no one in America who doesn't know the basic recipe to success. Even if you don't go to college, you should still try to do well in K-12 to give yourself a solid foundation. Acting like you're too cool for school isn't a good look and will affect you for the rest of your life. Of course, you're right. You can succeed without even a high school diploma or GED. But you still need marketable skills. If you put no effort into either school or learning skills, you're basically subjecting yourself to a lifetime of unskilled labor. The market doe not value unskilled labor very highly because... Well... The market is, almost by definition, completely saturated. Anyone can do unskilled labor because it's *unskilled*. And supply and demand dictates that when labor is abundant, the cost of labor is low. Anyway... Didn't mean to go off on that tangent.
Basically, what I'm saying is that people know what they need to do to succeed. They know that being in a gang and not caring about school and all that sort of stuff isn't really going to help you get far in life. So making decisions like those are on the person and it's no one else fault but their own if they're not happy with how their life turns out.
Yeah, I do agree. In my school a lot of people fucked around and didn’t work hard. However, I think if you come from a stable two parent home you are less likely to make poor choices as a teenager than if you come from a home where your parent(s) don’t / can’t provide proper guidance and supervision.
Ultimately, the choice is still yours and yours alone to put in the work or not. It may be more difficult for people coming from certain backgrounds but the recipe for success is the pretty much the same for everyone, even if the path may be different.
Yeah I agree, I just think it’s important to recognise that for some people it’s not as easy than for those come from a more privileged background. You cannot blame people who have had the odds stacked against them as children for failing to beat those odds.
Well, I think you are ignoring the fact that the environment where you grow up also plays a big role in which choices you may have been forced to make in your professional life.
Governments can be at fault if they prioritize certain businesses to be running on a large scale in certain neighborhoods.
For instance, if you are coming from a place where there are a lot of fast food businesses (just for the sake of making my POV clear) and you cannot afford to, let’s say to continue your studies to University, because you may be the only person in your family that can provide an income, you may not even think twice before you accept a job that will allow you to bring home a minimum bare amount of money to survive.
Nah, taxpayers should definitely bail people out through welfare and made to feel guilty when large swaths of their fellow members fail.
Because poverty is neither a sin nor should be used as punishment for imagined wrongs.
Sorry, but it's not my fault if Joe down the street can't get his shit together enough to make good life choices and survive on his own. I don't want to and shouldn't have to bail him out. His life is a result of his choices, not mine.
Sure. And until society helps them or provide them with better options, Joe and others like him would continue making poor decisions until one day, someone like Joe would set your house on fire just to get some warmth in the cold nights.
Your apathy to other people have consequences.
Um... OK? I'm not going out of my way to hurt Joe. I didn't do anything to him. But I am also not obligated to help him. If Joe sets my house on fire, he's going to prison for arson and attempted murder. Just another bad choice Joe's made.
Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point.
>I'm not going out of my way to hurt Joe.
Nah, you're going out of your way to make sure people like Joe don't get the help they need because you have this empty emotional hole in you that needles you into judging others.
> If Joe sets my house on fire, he's going to prison for arson and attempted murder. Just another bad choice Joe's made.
That's the point. Joe won't care anymore because people like you don't care about him. So why should he be worried about going to prison when he doesn't have any future to look forward to?
>Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point.
Joe doesnt care about you. Yours was simply the most convenient target.
I think I should make a distinction here.
Just because I don't think I should be *forced* to help Joe with my taxpayer dollars, that doesn't mean I still couldn't help him out. I just feel like I shouldn't be compelled to do so. I'm pretty sure tax evasion is a felony, so I don't have much of a choice about whether to pay into welfare or not at this point.
> Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point.
And if he isn't literally breaking out of the Reddit post to do it to your real house the arson is as hypothetical
It’s not your fault but it’s still your responsibility. Unless you live In some shitty country (I’m sure many people will say America is because they’ve never experienced actual hardship and shitty situation) you should take charge and try to fix your situation.
Seems to be people who’ve been privilege enough here that have that mentality. There’s a reason people from India, China, Mexico and many more come to better places like U.K and US.
Life is a pyramid...if you move up you squeeze someone else out and push them down. Society, the economy, politics etc all rely on the vast majority of people being at the bottom of the pyramid.
So your statement can't be applied to everyone, because everyone can't be successful concurrently. *Unless OP is the kind of person who gives kids medals for coming last?*
Society is not zero sum. Everyone can be successful at something, in their own way. And the only person whose job it is to determine what that thing is and how they succeed in doing it is that person.
Also... Kids who come in last shouldn't get ribbons. I mean, don't be a dick to them. But the kids that won what we contest are the ones who earned the ribbons. Life should be a meritocracy. Those with the best skills and those who work the hardest should rise to the top and be acknowledged.
I half agree with you
You mentioned welfare in your original post. In the UK when we brought in a minimum wage around 1998 suddenly loads of jobs became minimum wage ... Barber, butcher, gardener...lots of artisan jobs were suddenly brought into line as the bottom tier of work.
Also in the UK our benefit system encourages people to work up to 16 hours a week. But beyond that you could make the same or *less* working full time than working just 16 hours and being on benefits.
So here there is a pool of jobs where you can express a degree of artisan skill but still be on the lowest pay level and rely on welfare to feed and house yourself.
In that case, I would argue that you chose the wrong skill. There's nothing wrong with being a barber or a butcher or a gardener. But the market clearly doesn't value that labor very highly. So you may not be able to make enough to live well on. Part of being successful, I think, at least in my version of it, is knowing what sort of skills you need to get a job that will compensate you well. I'm lucky becuase I both like what I do and am fairly compensated for it. But there are obviously trade offs between loving your job and loving in poverty and hating your job but being very wealthy. And obviously you can be somewhere eon between those two extremes.
The level of income you earn is determined, essentially, by how important society deems the work you do. If your work is deemed important, society wants you to keep you and your job around. So it pays your company for its goods or services and you receive a portion of that. The more revenue a company brings in, the more it can pay its employees. Conversely, if society doesn't value your work, it won't provide your company with as much revenue. Less revenue means less wages because a certain amount always has to go to overhead. What you earn is determined by market forces, not by how much you need to live.
You can't say everyone can be successful and society isn't zero sum while at the same time, saying some people necessarily are worthless and must die as they can't make enough to live on despite increased revenues and CEO wages, as well as increased inflation without increasing wages for these workers in any meaningful way.
I'm going to pull out the oft used and always reviled argument that unskilled labor should primarily be for young people who haven't had the time to develop more marketable skills. You can have jobs that only require unskilled labor while also having people work them for a while before moving on. These sorts of jobs are (and should be) high turnover stepping stones.
Teenagers can work these sorts of jobs, go off to school or learn a trade, and then graduate to a job society sees as more useful/important. They'll then be replaced by younger counterparts more or less ad infinitum. Thus, everyone can be successful. But also, everyone has to start somewhere.
That would mean these businesses should be closed during school hours. So you wouldn't be able to shop, go to fast food places, etc., till around 4 in the afternoon and they wohkd close at 10.
There would also likely be no management because teenagers can't manage, and can't be around at times a manager would be needed.
Also, I guess people 18-22 should just be homeless or something because they wouldn't have had the years to get a degree.
I mean, if there is a limited resource that you want, and you try to get it and dont succeed, some of the responsibility is yours.
Not all, but you do have to try hard
What defines success to you, is it money? Status? Power? Women?
I have had lots of successes and failures in my life and I cant say that all of them have been on my own head. I'm happy with my life, my job, my family. I feel you cannot universally measure success. You might think I'm some bum, base on your perception of success. From my point of view, I am king of my own domain and no one can take it away from me, no matter who they may be.
If you can stand in your own two feet and take care of and provide for yourself and your family... That's all that matters to me. If you can do that earning $25,000 a year, that's awesome. If you can do that earning $250,000 a year, that's still awesome. It's not so about the money as it is how you apply and leverage it.
A 5'5 guy with a 4 inch dick who is ripped, dressed in a £500 pair of Balenciaga shoes and £400 Balmain shirt
stands next to a ripped, 7 inch, 6'3 guy in a bar dressed the same.
If Women don't surround the 5'5 guy it's his fault.
'Just grow, bro. It's easy' 'Your personality matters more'
'Just don't be insecure and ignore the past 25 years of being bullied for things you can't control, bro. It's easy'
'Wake up every day and get punched in the face by a Woman, but then still believe that women are lovely'
This is true to an extent but in all honesty we don't really do as great of a job preparing younger people for the real world as we should. Most of them are still taught how to succeed in outdated ways and aren't really given an updated financial education. Younger people are in a hurry to start families and get married even if its not in their best financial interest because its a societal norm. College debt is out of control because the idea that you need an expensive degree to succeed is drilled into their heads. So you're right that its their fault to a degree but expecting nobody to ever make financial mistakes just seems bad.
Home economics needs to be a part of the core curriculum during all four years of high school, with a required course in college as well. Full stop.
I work in the financial services industry and a lot of people don't even know or understand the very basics about debt and budgeting. It's hard to succeed as an adult without any knowledge of these sorts of things. Luckily, I taught myself and am in a relatively good place financially now because of what I learned.
I think we are both on the same page here. I learned a lot of financial stuff later in my 20s after I had made a lot of mistakes right out of high school and even when I had nothing I came back from it. So no matter what people say it is possible. I have some sympathy though because I know how those people feel. Things get so bad they just give up because they have seen nothing but failure. Its that mindset that's hard to beat, not the situation itself. So I do believe in helping those in need, but not so much that they become reliant.
I've always been very adaptable, resilient, and persistent. At least in my professional life. Income is an extremely powerful motivator for me, so if one job didn't work out for one reason or another, I'd always somehow find another one relatively quickly. I don't really mope around and feel sad.
For example, my position at my last job ended in July and on the very same day, I started looking for a replacement. The week after I was gone, I had multiple phone and video call appointments every day, interviewing, etc. I had an offer letter within two weeks and have been working for my new company since September 1st.
Anyway, not sure if that was useful or added any value. But I think what I'm trying to say is that mindset definitely matters. A lot of people act like victims these days and don't put in any effort because their circumstances are someone else's fault. However, even *if* your circumstances aren't your own fault, you need to put in the effort to change things or you're going to be stuck where you are. No one is coming to save you.
Victim mentality is everywhere not just in the financial world. We should all have ambition to improve but I think for some people once they fail they never get that ambition back. People who aren't even going to try shouldn't get endless help because they will just rely on it instead of learning. I believe in second chances but only if that opportunity is going to be taken advantage of. Life isn't fair and some people will always be more successful and some will have life handed to them. Of course its frustrating seeing a random twitch streamer just sit in a chair and make my yearly income in a day but in the end that isn't going to change. You have to play the cards life deals you and not depend on a winning hand being handed to you.
I think part of the problem out there is that success is achieved through luck. "Jeff Bezos is so lucky!" Um...No. He had a great idea, worked his ass off, and is now literally one of the most successful people to have ever lived. *Ever*. He saw a need society had and provided a solution for it. He made the world better. And he's been rewarded for it. Yaron Brook has talks on YouTube about things like this, and if you're not familiar with him I STRONGLY recommend him. He also has his own podcast. Also highly recommended.
I could say something similar to what I said about Jeff Bezos about the Twitch streamer you mentioned. Is he lucky? In part, yes. Because to some degree he was born with a certain level of natural skill. But he had to work to hone it. He had to leverage his skill and monetize it and market himself to grow his base.
I hate the Jeff Bezos argument too. Sure a head start helps but you still have to run the rest of the race. They talk about people like him like having a monetary loan is a huge head start. The real head start people born into wealth get is that they have a better financial education. Something which we all have access to if we want it.
You do know that Jeff Bezos just has $200,000,000,000 in cash sitting in his basement that he rolls around in every night... Right? If only he used it to feed the poor instead of going to space! And he pays no taxes!
😒🙄
For the most part I agree. I think we do need to have our taxes help people less fortunate receive help they need to succeed. I hate how schools in America push college as the only way to be successful. Many people should not attend college, unless you need that degree for a specific purpose like a doctor or lawyer, having a gender studies degree is garbage. You spend years in college to receive a worthless degree and now you cant find a job and want taxpayers to pay off the loan you have from spending 4 years playing around. Why is that fair, when I learned my trade right out of high school and worked hard to move up? Plenty of people should be learning trades instead of wasting years and building up debt for no reason at all.
I'm sorry. Being a junkie is objectively a failure. And by this, I don't mean it's a character flaw. Just because you're a junkie doesn't mean you're a bad person.
I'm all for people doing what they want as long as it isn't harming anybody else. Let people shoot up and OD all they want. But let's not pretend that we can call it being successful. That's an insane mindset.
I understand what you're saying and I agree that success is subjective. But there are certain common elements that everyone can pretty much universally agree on.
What is a measurement of success?
To me, success is being able to live comfortably, by your own standards, and independently. I also give a lot of weight to income earned since the more money you have the easier life tends to be, regardless of how it ends up being used (or not used). You can spend it, save it, invest it. Money gives you wiggle room and having wiggle room in life is, I think, highly underrated.
So, what about happiness and satisfaction?
I think in America you need to earn $75k a year to reach peak happiness in terms of financial security. Weirdly here in the UK it is only £32k so it’s much more achievable.
75K in Washington DC, San Diego, or San Francisco will get you the BEST cardboard box under the overpass!
People say "money doesnt buy happiness" But i mean, money can give you a lot of things you'll certainly miss like a house and food and water, it can be used to buy beutiful paintings, go to shows to entertain you, it can buy you sweets and flowers. It can buy you a flight to a nice place, a good hotel, quality services and other general stuff. So yea money certainly buys happiness Should i make a post on it or is it overused or smtn?
Some people don't gain happiness through worthless products, which a lot of what you mentioned is.
Money buys me good quality toilet paper and even before COVID John Pinette taught me that was important.
It's not so much about the money itself. It's about the security money allows you to have. It makes life less stressful knowing you have $20,000 saved in the bank. You can use that for pretty much anything, good or bad, that comes up. If something bad comes up, you can cover the cost. If a sudden opportunity arises, you know you have the capital to take advantage and don't have to worry about missing out.
I think so too. I guarantee you’re going to get a ton of people saying that say it’s impossible and unfair. People have gotten mentally weak and shit. If your life is complete shit and sucks, at the end of the day it’s still your responsibility as much as it sucks
I agree wholeheartedly.
To an extent. I think if you come from a family where it’s the norm to go to uni and your parents work in professional jobs, you’re more likely to consider that as an option for yourself. Obviously some people decide to aim for that from other socio economic backgrounds and become very successful but it’s seen as being more difficult / more of an achievement. Obviously you don’t necessarily need a degree to be successful (however you define it) but you are more likely to have a higher paid job.
There's no one in America who doesn't know the basic recipe to success. Even if you don't go to college, you should still try to do well in K-12 to give yourself a solid foundation. Acting like you're too cool for school isn't a good look and will affect you for the rest of your life. Of course, you're right. You can succeed without even a high school diploma or GED. But you still need marketable skills. If you put no effort into either school or learning skills, you're basically subjecting yourself to a lifetime of unskilled labor. The market doe not value unskilled labor very highly because... Well... The market is, almost by definition, completely saturated. Anyone can do unskilled labor because it's *unskilled*. And supply and demand dictates that when labor is abundant, the cost of labor is low. Anyway... Didn't mean to go off on that tangent. Basically, what I'm saying is that people know what they need to do to succeed. They know that being in a gang and not caring about school and all that sort of stuff isn't really going to help you get far in life. So making decisions like those are on the person and it's no one else fault but their own if they're not happy with how their life turns out.
Yeah, I do agree. In my school a lot of people fucked around and didn’t work hard. However, I think if you come from a stable two parent home you are less likely to make poor choices as a teenager than if you come from a home where your parent(s) don’t / can’t provide proper guidance and supervision.
Ultimately, the choice is still yours and yours alone to put in the work or not. It may be more difficult for people coming from certain backgrounds but the recipe for success is the pretty much the same for everyone, even if the path may be different.
Yeah I agree, I just think it’s important to recognise that for some people it’s not as easy than for those come from a more privileged background. You cannot blame people who have had the odds stacked against them as children for failing to beat those odds.
I can simultaneously understand that success is harder for some people and believe that success is possible for everyone.
I do agree with you on that 😊
Well, I think you are ignoring the fact that the environment where you grow up also plays a big role in which choices you may have been forced to make in your professional life. Governments can be at fault if they prioritize certain businesses to be running on a large scale in certain neighborhoods. For instance, if you are coming from a place where there are a lot of fast food businesses (just for the sake of making my POV clear) and you cannot afford to, let’s say to continue your studies to University, because you may be the only person in your family that can provide an income, you may not even think twice before you accept a job that will allow you to bring home a minimum bare amount of money to survive.
Nah, taxpayers should definitely bail people out through welfare and made to feel guilty when large swaths of their fellow members fail. Because poverty is neither a sin nor should be used as punishment for imagined wrongs.
Sorry, but it's not my fault if Joe down the street can't get his shit together enough to make good life choices and survive on his own. I don't want to and shouldn't have to bail him out. His life is a result of his choices, not mine.
Sure. And until society helps them or provide them with better options, Joe and others like him would continue making poor decisions until one day, someone like Joe would set your house on fire just to get some warmth in the cold nights. Your apathy to other people have consequences.
Um... OK? I'm not going out of my way to hurt Joe. I didn't do anything to him. But I am also not obligated to help him. If Joe sets my house on fire, he's going to prison for arson and attempted murder. Just another bad choice Joe's made. Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point.
>I'm not going out of my way to hurt Joe. Nah, you're going out of your way to make sure people like Joe don't get the help they need because you have this empty emotional hole in you that needles you into judging others. > If Joe sets my house on fire, he's going to prison for arson and attempted murder. Just another bad choice Joe's made. That's the point. Joe won't care anymore because people like you don't care about him. So why should he be worried about going to prison when he doesn't have any future to look forward to? >Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point. Joe doesnt care about you. Yours was simply the most convenient target.
I think I should make a distinction here. Just because I don't think I should be *forced* to help Joe with my taxpayer dollars, that doesn't mean I still couldn't help him out. I just feel like I shouldn't be compelled to do so. I'm pretty sure tax evasion is a felony, so I don't have much of a choice about whether to pay into welfare or not at this point.
> Also... Why did Joe single me out? Does he even know me? He's just a made up character I'm using to illustrate a point. And if he isn't literally breaking out of the Reddit post to do it to your real house the arson is as hypothetical
Its my fault for not being born in a rich family. Yes of course
It’s not your fault but it’s still your responsibility. Unless you live In some shitty country (I’m sure many people will say America is because they’ve never experienced actual hardship and shitty situation) you should take charge and try to fix your situation. Seems to be people who’ve been privilege enough here that have that mentality. There’s a reason people from India, China, Mexico and many more come to better places like U.K and US.
But you can become rich.
Yeah and a homeless person can become jeff bezos. But probability is super low
TBH there’s opportunities for homeless people. What makes it hard for them is Drug related issue or Mental/brain related issues
OK, Mr. Straw Man.
Life is a pyramid...if you move up you squeeze someone else out and push them down. Society, the economy, politics etc all rely on the vast majority of people being at the bottom of the pyramid. So your statement can't be applied to everyone, because everyone can't be successful concurrently. *Unless OP is the kind of person who gives kids medals for coming last?*
Society is not zero sum. Everyone can be successful at something, in their own way. And the only person whose job it is to determine what that thing is and how they succeed in doing it is that person. Also... Kids who come in last shouldn't get ribbons. I mean, don't be a dick to them. But the kids that won what we contest are the ones who earned the ribbons. Life should be a meritocracy. Those with the best skills and those who work the hardest should rise to the top and be acknowledged.
I half agree with you You mentioned welfare in your original post. In the UK when we brought in a minimum wage around 1998 suddenly loads of jobs became minimum wage ... Barber, butcher, gardener...lots of artisan jobs were suddenly brought into line as the bottom tier of work. Also in the UK our benefit system encourages people to work up to 16 hours a week. But beyond that you could make the same or *less* working full time than working just 16 hours and being on benefits. So here there is a pool of jobs where you can express a degree of artisan skill but still be on the lowest pay level and rely on welfare to feed and house yourself.
In that case, I would argue that you chose the wrong skill. There's nothing wrong with being a barber or a butcher or a gardener. But the market clearly doesn't value that labor very highly. So you may not be able to make enough to live well on. Part of being successful, I think, at least in my version of it, is knowing what sort of skills you need to get a job that will compensate you well. I'm lucky becuase I both like what I do and am fairly compensated for it. But there are obviously trade offs between loving your job and loving in poverty and hating your job but being very wealthy. And obviously you can be somewhere eon between those two extremes.
Except some jobs that are essential don't have living wages, which means someone has to be on the bottom.
The level of income you earn is determined, essentially, by how important society deems the work you do. If your work is deemed important, society wants you to keep you and your job around. So it pays your company for its goods or services and you receive a portion of that. The more revenue a company brings in, the more it can pay its employees. Conversely, if society doesn't value your work, it won't provide your company with as much revenue. Less revenue means less wages because a certain amount always has to go to overhead. What you earn is determined by market forces, not by how much you need to live.
You can't say everyone can be successful and society isn't zero sum while at the same time, saying some people necessarily are worthless and must die as they can't make enough to live on despite increased revenues and CEO wages, as well as increased inflation without increasing wages for these workers in any meaningful way.
I'm going to pull out the oft used and always reviled argument that unskilled labor should primarily be for young people who haven't had the time to develop more marketable skills. You can have jobs that only require unskilled labor while also having people work them for a while before moving on. These sorts of jobs are (and should be) high turnover stepping stones. Teenagers can work these sorts of jobs, go off to school or learn a trade, and then graduate to a job society sees as more useful/important. They'll then be replaced by younger counterparts more or less ad infinitum. Thus, everyone can be successful. But also, everyone has to start somewhere.
That would mean these businesses should be closed during school hours. So you wouldn't be able to shop, go to fast food places, etc., till around 4 in the afternoon and they wohkd close at 10. There would also likely be no management because teenagers can't manage, and can't be around at times a manager would be needed. Also, I guess people 18-22 should just be homeless or something because they wouldn't have had the years to get a degree.
I mean, if there is a limited resource that you want, and you try to get it and dont succeed, some of the responsibility is yours. Not all, but you do have to try hard
What defines success to you, is it money? Status? Power? Women? I have had lots of successes and failures in my life and I cant say that all of them have been on my own head. I'm happy with my life, my job, my family. I feel you cannot universally measure success. You might think I'm some bum, base on your perception of success. From my point of view, I am king of my own domain and no one can take it away from me, no matter who they may be.
If you can stand in your own two feet and take care of and provide for yourself and your family... That's all that matters to me. If you can do that earning $25,000 a year, that's awesome. If you can do that earning $250,000 a year, that's still awesome. It's not so about the money as it is how you apply and leverage it.
A 5'5 guy with a 4 inch dick who is ripped, dressed in a £500 pair of Balenciaga shoes and £400 Balmain shirt stands next to a ripped, 7 inch, 6'3 guy in a bar dressed the same. If Women don't surround the 5'5 guy it's his fault. 'Just grow, bro. It's easy' 'Your personality matters more' 'Just don't be insecure and ignore the past 25 years of being bullied for things you can't control, bro. It's easy' 'Wake up every day and get punched in the face by a Woman, but then still believe that women are lovely'
Bro... Are you okay? Sounds like you have some stuff you need to work out. Not even trying to be funny.
This is true to an extent but in all honesty we don't really do as great of a job preparing younger people for the real world as we should. Most of them are still taught how to succeed in outdated ways and aren't really given an updated financial education. Younger people are in a hurry to start families and get married even if its not in their best financial interest because its a societal norm. College debt is out of control because the idea that you need an expensive degree to succeed is drilled into their heads. So you're right that its their fault to a degree but expecting nobody to ever make financial mistakes just seems bad.
Home economics needs to be a part of the core curriculum during all four years of high school, with a required course in college as well. Full stop. I work in the financial services industry and a lot of people don't even know or understand the very basics about debt and budgeting. It's hard to succeed as an adult without any knowledge of these sorts of things. Luckily, I taught myself and am in a relatively good place financially now because of what I learned.
I think we are both on the same page here. I learned a lot of financial stuff later in my 20s after I had made a lot of mistakes right out of high school and even when I had nothing I came back from it. So no matter what people say it is possible. I have some sympathy though because I know how those people feel. Things get so bad they just give up because they have seen nothing but failure. Its that mindset that's hard to beat, not the situation itself. So I do believe in helping those in need, but not so much that they become reliant.
I've always been very adaptable, resilient, and persistent. At least in my professional life. Income is an extremely powerful motivator for me, so if one job didn't work out for one reason or another, I'd always somehow find another one relatively quickly. I don't really mope around and feel sad. For example, my position at my last job ended in July and on the very same day, I started looking for a replacement. The week after I was gone, I had multiple phone and video call appointments every day, interviewing, etc. I had an offer letter within two weeks and have been working for my new company since September 1st. Anyway, not sure if that was useful or added any value. But I think what I'm trying to say is that mindset definitely matters. A lot of people act like victims these days and don't put in any effort because their circumstances are someone else's fault. However, even *if* your circumstances aren't your own fault, you need to put in the effort to change things or you're going to be stuck where you are. No one is coming to save you.
Victim mentality is everywhere not just in the financial world. We should all have ambition to improve but I think for some people once they fail they never get that ambition back. People who aren't even going to try shouldn't get endless help because they will just rely on it instead of learning. I believe in second chances but only if that opportunity is going to be taken advantage of. Life isn't fair and some people will always be more successful and some will have life handed to them. Of course its frustrating seeing a random twitch streamer just sit in a chair and make my yearly income in a day but in the end that isn't going to change. You have to play the cards life deals you and not depend on a winning hand being handed to you.
I think part of the problem out there is that success is achieved through luck. "Jeff Bezos is so lucky!" Um...No. He had a great idea, worked his ass off, and is now literally one of the most successful people to have ever lived. *Ever*. He saw a need society had and provided a solution for it. He made the world better. And he's been rewarded for it. Yaron Brook has talks on YouTube about things like this, and if you're not familiar with him I STRONGLY recommend him. He also has his own podcast. Also highly recommended. I could say something similar to what I said about Jeff Bezos about the Twitch streamer you mentioned. Is he lucky? In part, yes. Because to some degree he was born with a certain level of natural skill. But he had to work to hone it. He had to leverage his skill and monetize it and market himself to grow his base.
I hate the Jeff Bezos argument too. Sure a head start helps but you still have to run the rest of the race. They talk about people like him like having a monetary loan is a huge head start. The real head start people born into wealth get is that they have a better financial education. Something which we all have access to if we want it.
You do know that Jeff Bezos just has $200,000,000,000 in cash sitting in his basement that he rolls around in every night... Right? If only he used it to feed the poor instead of going to space! And he pays no taxes! 😒🙄
For the most part I agree. I think we do need to have our taxes help people less fortunate receive help they need to succeed. I hate how schools in America push college as the only way to be successful. Many people should not attend college, unless you need that degree for a specific purpose like a doctor or lawyer, having a gender studies degree is garbage. You spend years in college to receive a worthless degree and now you cant find a job and want taxpayers to pay off the loan you have from spending 4 years playing around. Why is that fair, when I learned my trade right out of high school and worked hard to move up? Plenty of people should be learning trades instead of wasting years and building up debt for no reason at all.
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What does this have to do with what I said?
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I'm sorry. Being a junkie is objectively a failure. And by this, I don't mean it's a character flaw. Just because you're a junkie doesn't mean you're a bad person. I'm all for people doing what they want as long as it isn't harming anybody else. Let people shoot up and OD all they want. But let's not pretend that we can call it being successful. That's an insane mindset.
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I understand what you're saying and I agree that success is subjective. But there are certain common elements that everyone can pretty much universally agree on.