Warning You About Life, Yes Warning for Young People
This article is for you if you are middle or moving towards middle class.
Good grief watching people grow into adulthood is difficult. My mother let me be when I was growing up. It is just the way it was. I was fiercely independent (why?) and she accepted my decision making. Even if she didn’t she was too busy working and killing herself by overworking to do anything about my choices as a child.
Luckily I had some good ideas about where I wanted to go in life and what I wanted to do. I always had the idea that I was going forward, myself, not by directorate but because of my own ideas and wisdom.
Youth
I look at the wisdom word now and laugh, I had no wisdom then. Then I made a bad decision and married young and had 2 babies as a teenager. It was a bad decision because I was dumped very shortly after my youngest was born and was immediately in poverty with a real sense of desperation.
Of course my mother helped me and protected my children. She even covered for me when all the struggling in the world was not enough to feed those children. This was back in the day when a father could abandon his child and get away with it.
This is one of those decisions with very long term consequences. I can’t tell you how many times (countless) I said to myself: You made the choice to have children first, it precedes this moment, your duty is to them, the preceding decision.
College is a Good Thing:
How much more do college graduates earn than high school graduates and then high school dropouts? The margin is wide.
I was lucky in that my life worked out to give me college. I was even able to go to graduate school. This balanced me and gave me the horizon I needed to continue, to be a professional and therefor to integrate into society. My mother’s family always worked on the edge of society. Patsy was a bartender for thirty years until the day that she died.
Back to warning: those early decisions set the stage for your entire life, hence the warning. Sure, you can recover, I did. Make no mistake, the 10 years will cost you. The thing about it is, making those decisions at that age is always intense. You want to make decisions for yourself, but you also know that your parents are smart. How do you decide? Youth is hard.
Adulthood
You get in the game; you’ve finally made it into adulthood only to discover that the game is rigged. I was 36 years old before I figured this out. I had managed a very successful business, and I was rocketing to the C-Suite when I found out that I would have to play by unethical rules to reap the rewards of the C-Suite.
I had done all the things. These things that are requirements for successful middle class living only to find out that it doesn’t work for everyone. I was divorced. Shame on me. Then I was stalked. Then nasty things were implied then said and then done to me.
It brought me to my knees. But it didn’t impoverish me, not this time.
Get Back to Work
Of course I got up and got back to work. It cost me. I swore off the C-Suite. My friend hired me, I told him no promotions, never, I would stay where I was. For the most part, I did.
And you move on, then you move on. You think that you might want love and all the accoutrements. But that doesn’t work out either. And still, you move on.
Be Thoughtful
Whatever you do, be thoughtful. If fifty people tell you something about you, you might want to believe it. Don’t turn 40 years old and go “oh shit, how did I get here?” You can go online anytime to https://www.ssa.gov/ to see a perfect recorded history of your work life. That’s important information. My own son did not know that Social Security benefits entitled his wife to widow’s benefits if he passed away.
Warning: Life Gets You, and not in a good way. Start out slow, trust older people who love you – yeah they have an agenda, but they also have wisdom: something that you don’t have when young.
