Ordinary is no longer economically survivable.
I live below the poverty line in the United States and my life is great. My health insurance is 100% free and probably the best in the world. I get financial aid from different government sources that give me a comfortable simple life.
The people who feel they need to own cars or houses and have children struggle to meet their personal expectations. Their struggle and wealth subsidies my lifestyle.
I don't consider wealthy people my enemy or "rich fools." Instead I see them as people who psychologically for one reason or another have certain expectations about what life is supposed to be. They wouldn't want my life for free and I wouldn't want their life at a cost. Does my lifestyle carry a social stigma? Of course. But do I really care what someone else thinks when I'm basically allowed to live in a first world country for free? Not even a little bit.
To me this is as fair as you can probably get in an economic system.
I don't value travel enough to change my lifestyle so I wont work toward that end but if you do then you should. I say this with zero judgment or passive aggressive intention.
I contribute to society by making the choices I want and not imposing my expectations of contribution on to others.
The best thing you can do for society is take care of yourself first, because that's what you have the most control over. How justified is much of the debt, guilt and obligation that we feel? I guess most of us believe that if we shirked these things then babies would be abandoned in the streets and all sorts of lawlessness would occur.
Is my lifestyle naive and selfish? Maybe. But I know who I am and I don't have to justify my choices to anyone else. I am not going to make a list of my good deeds to make sure people respect me. What if instead of trying to save the world so you can be happy you chose to be happy and that led to you saving the world? Why do we assume the former is more true than the latter?
It's really hard to talk about these things without coming off as being "holier than thou" but I think they're questions worth asking. They're questions I still ask myself all the time, I don't believe that I've reached some higher plane of enlightenment with all the answers.
People should be allowed to suffer and sacrifice their happiness but they have to want to it can't be imposed on them (consciously or not).
Yes, possibly yes, and no.
The great thing about personal expectations is that they're personal.
I'd argue the choice to have children guarantees you a future benefactor to your retirement plan (planning a life that guarantees you subsidies).
That is really the spirit of my comment.
An enormous disservice to American school kids for the past forty years has been the ad nauseum repetition that you either graduate college or you’re a failure who’s a complete drain on society. This is bollocks. After training a few years, work in some skilled trades pays six figures. Others are easily making upwards of $70k. If you can’t survive on that, tighten your belt or move to a lower cost-of-living area.
Just like everyone you went to college with wasn’t a fit for med school, not everyone you went to high school is cut out for college. Learning a trade in vocational training may be exactly what they’re looking for and is definitely a path to good jobs. Earning a decent, respectable living is fine and in no way a comment on the person’s character or value or intelligence, but by painting it as “alternative school” with the connotation of a one-way track to Loserville, axe grinders have made the situation far worse.
Now, it’s true that being a fry jockey — or any other job where anyone can walk in off the street and do the same task with little training — is not economically survivable, but a career that peaks at unskilled labor is far worse than ordinary.
However what if you fail at learning 1 or two skilled trades?
Plus even those in skilled trades need to know at least the bare basics of entrepreneurship. The days of cushy union jobs are over.
Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or bricklayer either.
The average person certainly has a job and can support themselves. Our unemployment is not 50%
The vast majority of people in the US with decent health insurance are not "exceptional overachiever[s]." Heck, I know more than a dozen people who literally sit around and watch TV 16 hours a day and have decent health insurance, including my own father who hasn't been employed in almost 40 years. To do that you just (usually) gotta be married.