[ryanmarsh]

This. I hate my job but tell me some other way I can make $300k (I'm basically doing management consulting). I'm 38 with 3 kids and my wife doesn't earn an income (she homeschools the kids). I suck it up so they're well provided for.

[evmar]

300k is nearly 6 times the median US income, and even the median US income is double that of high-quality-of-life places like Germany. Literally most of the planet has happy families with significantly less money than that.

It's facile of me to diagnose your life over the internet but I often think of the deathbed quote:

"I wish I had earned more money and spent less time with my family" -- no one ever

[geodel]

I think that deathbed quote is more about people who had reasonably successful life and had family. I doubt that 100s of millions in 3rd world dying in penury with no family to talk of would make similar statements. Perhaps their statements would be so pedestrian as not to be noted down.

[ryanmarsh]

I dated a Columbian girl (an illegal actually) before I met my wife. I remember one day she slapped me across the face and with tears of anger made it clear how stupid I was. My mistake? Uttering the bullshit platitude: "better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable". She said, "you don't know what poor is, we couldn't even afford a toothbrush. We weren't happy we were miserable. How dare you."

[ryanmarsh]

That's just evidence that wages are low. Seriously. If I make 6 times the median, we have a problem in this country. I don't know how you buy groceries for a family and pay for healthcare on 50k / yr.

[evmar]

You say "a problem in this country", but my point is that even the <=50k that literally half the US households make is itself a lot of money compared to the 25k earned in a "rich" country like Germany, and other countries are even poorer.

Universal healthcare in Germany likely helps offset the cost to some extent, but in the US those who even have healthcare usually get it through their employer. Really, it's more just a different expectation about what a reasonable life is.

I always think of how complex a television is, with thousands of little tiny components that had to be mined from the earth and forged and assembled and soldered (likely involving some child labor that we'd all prefer not to think about) and how many hundreds of people were involved. And then how it's just assumed in the US that it's reasonable to be able afford one of these in exchange for doing something simple like working a cash register at a bank for a few weeks, or how your quality of life somehow requires having multiple televisions etc.