| I grew up poor, made okay money when I started my development career, and now make more money than all of my friends from the business I started 5 years ago. I am by no means rich, but I am comfortable. I also have a pretty flexible schedule and I bought a nice house a couple of years ago. I've pretty much stopped telling people that I have a business because there is an automatic assumption that I am rich and either should pay more for something or don't understand what it's like to be poor. I've seen so many friends that barely scrape by, but choose to spend tons of cash every month on booze, weed, entertainment, new electronics, concerts, and all sorts of other non-essentials. I sacrificed all of this for years (I never get the latest and greatest phone and get the cheapest plan from Walmart), in exchange for a comfortable life now. Should I now somehow feel bad about this? Frankly, I'm tired of the people that wasted so much of their own money through poor life choices telling me why I should be giving more of the money I earned to pay for their lifestyle. With the attitudes I see online and in the media about anyone that has money, it's really not hard to see why the rich seem like they have lost any kind of empathy for the poor...I know I have. |