Haha you must be young. It's entirely possible young people will make the same choices and face the same realities I currently do. They just havent gotten to that stage yet. Even comparing my life now to my life 10 years ago would show the younger me had an easier life. However, having a disability is not a choice, and in general makes life harder than those without a disability. Don't get me wrong - I believe life is hard for almost everyone at at least one point or another in unique ways and to varying degrees.

Actually, I am not young. I just retired and have been thinking about my life, career, etc. I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise). I also agree with you that life can be hard, children are born with health challenges, children make poor decisions with terrible consequences, spouse dies, you get cancer, etc. We all need to get through these. That does not change the fact that we all have decisions to make everyday about our careers, our families, our health, our financial situation, and so on. When we look at those who made different decisions, it does not necessarily mean they made better or worse decisions, just different decisions.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and effective in the work place asked why the two of us had never gone the PE route and been more successful. While he is very successful by most standards, he sees people flying private jets all the time who do not appear more skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on the risk required to achieve that level of financial success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28 while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back, ending up at GE.

After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level of risk until my children were off to college and no longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I know who have been jet-money financially successful took huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s). Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or relationships with the children. This was their choice. Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated the effort and impact on those they cared about. However, most have not. They are happy with how things have turned out.

Different strokes for different folks.

The other factor you are missing in your analysis of PE route is the number of musical chairs are limited. There can only be 1 taylor swift not millions. So the choice is not for everyone. Even if everyone made that choice, a million taylor swifts will not happen. Surviorship bias is real.

Great point

It sounds like, by and large, you've had a pretty good life. But please understand that, while you've made good decisions and have taken advantage of the opportunities in front of you, a large chunk of your success comes down to random chance.

Many people do not fall on the good side of that random chance.

Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be seen by those who do not wear it.

What a great saying. I feel this in my very core.

Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens...

I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health.

I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.

And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Wisdom speaks. Hidden gem of this thread.

How do you know I have good health? What an incredibly smug comment meant to silence someone with no basis in fact.

Well, the person you originally replied to mentioned having a disability, and your response was "yeah but you have kids so really you chose this and also I disagree that life is harder for some people."

The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.

The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.

I actually agreed with them that a disability makes life harder. I then pointed out other things that an individual did not choose can make life harder as well.

As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.

> I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.”

It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.

Hmm.. I think we are talking past each other. In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

In my follow up comment I attempted to clarify my comment in response to giantg2's reply. "I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise)." I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult. I simply added that it is not the only thing that makes life more difficult. All of these things need to be considered when making career/job decisions.

Let me take a step back here. You're contradicting yourself.

> In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

> I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult.

Do you not see how it's hard to square the first statement, with the second? You do not agree that life is much harder for some people, but you do agree that a disability makes life more difficult?

> I think we are talking past each other. In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

It sounds like you have very little experience with people outside your socioeconomic class. (Or you do have that experience, but have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.) It is an obvious, proven fact that life is much harder for some people than for others.

My phone will drop contractions, and that would be charitable.

A double negative is risky without typos, though.

So you took the generous route in publicly shaming them.

I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.

I didn't publicly shame anyone. I pointed out their clear position of privilege to help them learn to apply empathy.

I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.

I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.

Text is a fairly imprecise form of communication. It's pretty common for multiple people to get triggered by misreading a post the same way if such a misread is possible.

In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.

People don't chose the abilities or disabilities they're born with, nor those they receive at the hands of others.

Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no matter how badly they want it.

I never said people choose disabilities. I tried to point out there are other life changing issues that can affect a person that they also did not choose.

As for starting a family, I agree not all can. My mistake was jumping from their assertion that I must be young to mean I did not have the responsibilities of an older worker such as taking care of a family. The less generous interpretation of that accusation is what? I am stupid? Ignorant of life? Not suffering from the impact of issues that I did not choose?

your argument sounds like "some people choose to do the dishes, some of us choose to let other people do the dishes".

Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.