(08-01-2017, 03:21 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: So that others might learn .... and ... for pure pleasure of venting.
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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.
(I am rewriting this to improve it).
In view of Asperger's Syndrome I wish I had been a philosophy major and psychology minor, or vice-versa, in college. Knowing about Asperger's from early adulthood 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. Learning will show you, even if you fail economically, some glories of culture that will give you cause to find meaning in life when life gets nasty.
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. Even if he is one-and-out, he will not be the last similarly-awful President. But latching onto a corrupt order makes one vulnerable in the event of a proletarian revolution whose first steps in establishing what looks like a better world begins with killing off those whose lives of luxury seem to result from the suffering of multitudes.
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 travelogues will better enrich your life than will fecal television. But not only place but time. There may be great gems of antiquity worthy of your attention. Such greats as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are still relevant.
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. Never sell out your principles to participate in something corrupt and exploitative.
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 won't 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. It may give you an opportunity to see the nastiness go away, as the grossly-unfit shorten their lives. 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. Even slavery had its loud defenders -- people who thought it the best of all possible institutions.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.