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Comment by apacheCamel | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I feel like I struggle with this a lot. Whether it be reading on here, or seeing it in the news, it is hard to not compare myself to a 20-something year old who just sold his/her company for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sit around reading the stupid article and playing Dota or starting my millionth side project. It is easy to see that not everyone is going to do something like that, but I think it is really hard to internalize the fact that I am the one not doing that too.

Then I get into this "well, won't be me anyway, so why bother" mood where I accomplish even less with my free time. I have urge to do more, but it is a vicious cycle sometimes.

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This made me think back to something I once attended, an eye opening weekend cross cultural course, with the purpose of getting to know the different nationalities I worked with. Why they/we would act/speak/behave as we do. We were a full ball room with multiple nationalities.

One of the speaks was about how different north is from the south, even within a country. Also, a huge difference was between Europe and US. Europe being a very old continent, lots of history and US a fairly new one, just a couple of hundred years old. The speaker said youths in US and Europe had been asked about whether they believed they would become millionaires during their life. About 90% in US had said yes vs. about 9% in Europe. The long statistics in Europe and fact that not so many will succeed had made us more realistic, but this new conquer-spirit that started US a long time ago, was still there.

That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at is is that it takes more than a couple hundred years to shake off the expectations of societies with fairly rigid class systems.

Any plumber (or other blue collar tradesman who is in business for themselves) at the end of their career can have a million bucks in assets. A house, maybe a vacation house on a lake, a fleet of <10 cube vans that ranges from clapped out to brand new, it's not hard for that to add up to a million bucks in personally owned assets. What most people will never have is a million bucks in their checking account.

Wow. Very well said, especially the part about "internalizing the fact that I am the one not doing that too." That resonated with me in a painful, aching way.

I'm turning 30 soon. That is by no means "old", but it also isn't "young." And I also made a minefield of my 20s, to the point where I'm worse off today than I was when I turned 20--a constant series of bad decisions over and over again.

The good thing is I'm trying to recover from all of it now and fix what I can fix, but the bad thing is that I'm seeing my friends and peers leap past me, people who I was competitive with all the way into college. I know it's not helpful to think like this, but I can't help it. We journey on.

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