SeaGypsy wrote:KJ thinks it's all cool, coz him & his are rich. I think the system is a great big scam, doesn't mean I'm a victim of it. I married to have children, who are both healthy, brilliant & beautiful. I have no confidence in the long term stability of the system. I've also no motivation to achieve someone else' idea of success, i have my own & am quite happy. (I'm yet to browse the 35 hour week thread).
There are a variety of strategies to gain independence. KJ mentions the pathway of working within the matrix, saving, being frugal, paying off your debts, working hard. This is honorable in so far as applies to ones personal integrity and fore sight in many cases. This does not however mean that those who have not achieved this necessarily lacked these hard working qualities and fore sight. This is the binary thinking mistake we often see. There are many who do not achieve financial independence because for many reasons the cards were stacked against them, whether for family reasons or bad luck or cultural legacies like racism etc.
Or let's take the current crop of millennials who are emerging as adults in an economic environment where employment and wage opportunities are not going to float as many hard working folks up to this kind of retirement status regardless of your personal integrity.
So then what? I look my two adult daughters. They are not willing, interested or focused on the established career pathways in any remote attempt to try to follow the path KJ took or what I took for that matter, paying my dues to the man and the matrix, being in the world of commerce for a couple of decades and taking those stored nuts and buying a cloud forest in Panama. That is not in the cards for either of my daughters or for many individuals with high work ethics and loads of integrity.
That is actually though exactly at that meeting point where there exists a tension out of which novel new arrangements can occur. Those who are personally weak but kind of losers are just going to follow the path of least resistance and end up wage slaves, impoverished and miserable.
But there will be emerging a crop of high integrity individuals butting up against a macro economic system weakened to the point where the cost benefit ratio of paying your dues to the man and the matrix will not be worth it as it was for KJ and me for example. That is where you then take an interesting percentage of the population, switched on, aware, smart and hard working but who refuse to play along. Who then look for other arrangements.
That is the edge where change happens.
KJ's post is an old baby boomers story, mine is similar. It is only partially relevant. The hard work part, the frugality part, the personal integrity part is all good and well. But the external environment is not the same.
A little bit of darwinian survival of the fittest is being introduced into our culture at large. This has been lacking. An opportunity for many to grow a spine. Many will not be up to the task. Others will.
As a father two millennials my advice is to go travelling, go experience many jobs, get street smart, abandon higher education and attempting to enter into a corporate world increasingly lacking real opportunities of wealth and creativity. It isn't worth it for most like it used to be. I was a beneficiary of a better economic time. So was KJ. The situation has changed and trying to chase dwindling crumbs by climbing up the corporate ladder is not only a dead end but not very fun anymore. I have advised my daughters against this.
Just some rambling thoughts here.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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