So, I don't know if I am in the minority or what but I'm 33 and not at all subsidized by my now single mother who raised me. I work a $hit ton of hours some weeks, travel away from my family of two kids and a wife who I support on just my income M-F, and still somehow find the spare change to enjoy the hobby that has me on this forum. Though I've got the $ time is now a large constraint. I like to think that I work pretty hard though it is white collar work, I'm not out sweating my butt off in some machine shop or outdoors. I've come across people who think white collar work is not hard work and could never be...OK. I help FDA regulated companies improve their efficiency and product safety/quality.
I do have lots of acquaintances who I used to call friends. We used to be closer but being away from home so much I am not able to "hang out" as often and it would also seem that as the success gap between myself and them grows they don't want to associate with me any longer. Fine I guess. One of my highschool buddies started his own business and is doing well, he's pretty much the only one that I still talk to. Neither of us have terribly a lot of free time, product of working hard. Others are working in pretty menial jobs and seem to change jobs like they are changing their underwear. In my opinion it is the culture we've all been accustomed to now where everything is instant. Amazon stuff in two days or less, food delivered to your door with no effort put into cooking it, media on demand (Netflix) without ever leaving your couch. Think about it, people really don't have to work for damn near anything at all anymore, let alone work hard.
So when someone at work puts a difficult task in front of you, you have absolutely no idea how to even begin the thought process of how to navigate that situation. People don't have the tools, mentally, to be successful anymore. Schools have no discipline, things that seem challenging are straight up removed from curriculum or delayed until later. We instead need to be pushing our children to do more difficult things earlier. If some of them fail at the task, fine. They can try it again later. Failures are good, they build character and teach way more than a success does. When everything goes as planned, you don't learn nearly as much when there are problems that need to be fixed first.
IMO the solution is to get people who are graduating highschool and not interested in college into the trades. Those folks a few years into their career are pulling down six figures. People going into college for a liberal arts degree...need to be given about $10 to live on for a week for like a month and then ask them if that was fun. Tell them thats what they are asking for the rest of their life to be like in choosing that field. I got an engineering degree that today I use sparingly directly but indirectly it gave me problem solving skills I can apply to pretty much any company willing to pay me what I think my time is worth.
