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While I understand your opinion, I couldn't disagree more. I've lived in Costa Rica and Honduras as a child. As an adult, I've also lived in Minnesota, Chicago, Rhode Island, LA, Fresno and now the Bay Area. Depending on your personality type, the city where you live is going to have a dramatic effect on your outlook on life. For instance, if you're a foodie or an artist Providence Rhode Island is going to be phenomenal for you. If you love sports, microbrews and hanging out with fraternity buddies, Chicago is phenomenal town. If you love hunting, fishing and "Going to the lake" every weekend, Minnesota is really wonderful. If you're trying to get into the film industry, or visual effects industry, there's no other place to be other than LA. But, if you're a young programer and want to live in a place where in an evening you can meet over a hundred other programmers doing cool assed shit with in functional programming, NoSQL, startups, iPhone programming, mobile, search, natural language processing, etc... Then, I would suggest avoiding Dubuque Iowa, and I'd suggest moving to the Bay Area: http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/calendar/13712630... </shameless plug> No, location doesn't change who you area as a person, but it certainly does open up a lot of different options if you're interested in that. No, making more money doesn't make you happier, but if you're seriously interested in debt reduction, and you commit to avoid "keeping up with the Joneses" and choose to live in a crap part of town for a year, while you pay down your credit cards, making $120k vs $60k is going to get you closer to your goal all other things being equal. A job: Wow, I couldn't disagree with you more. At 25 years old I'm not yet in the position of actually making big changes. Sure I can decide on a framework or the language to use, but do I choose which direction the company goes? Do I make hiring decisions? Not yet. Certainly in 5 years this will change but at 3 years out of college, even in startups, you're not given the sort of responsibility Completely disagree. In the Silicon Valley startup scene, no one cares how old you are. They generally care about what you can do and how well you do it. I hang out with 23 year old founders that have raised millions in funding, have revenue, are close to profitable, and have hired a dozen people. I have a hunch the scene in NYC may be quite a bit different. |
My motivation for posting my wall of text is that I just don't think his problem is external. Maybe external changes will prompt some introspective changes, maybe it won't, I just genuinely don't believe that latching on to meaning given to you by others (job, house, debt reduction) has inherent value when it comes to getting over an existentialist funk.
:)