09-06-2017, 04:24 PM
(08-01-2017, 03:21 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(07-31-2017, 07:03 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: So that others might learn .... and ... for pure pleasure of venting.
What were your wrong turns in life?
What was wrong about them and what were the lessons learned?
What would your X year old self tell your Y year old self and / or, what would you tell up and coming Millennials and eventually, Homelanders. A few Homelanders are now approaching tweenerhood, which is typically where wrong turns start to happen. Some of my earliest wrong turns happened when I was 9.
In view of Asperger's Syndrome I wish I had been a philosophy major and psychology minor, or vice-versa, in college. Knowing about it would have saved me much pointless hardship.
But I am going to give some more general advice.
1. Learning is worth the cost and potential disappointments. It may be the difference between getting work that you like and getting work that you hate -- and work that you hate will grind you. It may prepare you for a life unavailable to you; you may find that economic forces and the general corruption of our social order consign you to a job that you hate. So save every penny that you can to start a business. Train yourself for a job that pays better than what you get stuck with first.
2. Do not trust the political system. If the American people can end up with Donald Trump as President, then anything bad is possible. Expect government to first reward those who bought the politicians.
3. Expand your world. Even if you are too broke to travel beyond some dreary hick town, you can read. There is much video. Maybe travelo0gues will better enrich your life than will fecal television.
4. Don't allow your economic condition to be the cause of your esteem or lack thereof. Profit for elites, the only obvious virtue in America today, depends on multitudes being poor. Poverty is not shame. In a thoroughly-corrupt system it may be the strongest evidence of your integrity.
5. Stay clear of status symbols that demonstrate only two things: that you have the funds for buying them and that you are foolish enough to waste money on them. Truth be told, the Old Rich snicker at such things anyway. You can spend thousands of dollars on a wristwatch, and what will that wristwatch do that a throwaway watch from Wal*Mart will do? It will cost you savings or the opportunity to do something really interesting, and it will show the rest of the world that you are a schmuck insecure about how others perceive you.
6. Develop loyalties to family and community, even if those are terribly flawed, unless those are so dysfunctional as to cripple your life. Much of the needed improvement in America will come from people deciding to make miserable places, including ghettos, barrios, the Reservation, and dreary hick towns more tolerable. San Francisco may be a paradise due to the climate, but you may be priced into such a place as Lima, Ohio. Then make the best of Lima (which will be tough) and try to make it better. Incremental improvements, like moving to Fort Wayne or Toledo, may be all that are available.
7. Get in shape and stay in shape. Obesity is a choice, and a bad one. Avoid street drugs and drunkenness.
8. Don't watch so much TV. Don't be a big sports fan.
9. Remember this: everything corrupt, cruel, inequitable, and repressive in our society has powerful interests behind the nastiness.
I have the condition and yet somehow have managed to be able to reside within the quite pricey Chicago area. I have done it by renting rooms in private homes for the majority of my adult life. On one of the other threads I posted a blurb in response to your coming clean about the condition but it somehow got lost in the shuffle. Hope you got the chance to look at it. Many times I tend to feel a tad emotional about being cursed with this condition that has largely prevented me from living the lifestyle I had one aspired to.