| Agree. There is a sad, almost Catch-22 in the typical U.S. city where you need a car to make money and need money to buy a car. When I was unable to afford a car though I was able to find a (minimum wage) job and a place (well, room) to rent within a reasonable bicycle ride. (Yay, I did have a bicycle still from my high school days!) I did succeed though (was even able to begin college at a small community college — rode to my classes via bicycle). The first thing I bought though after food, rent, tuition and books was a rust-bucket of a car so that I had more choices in employment. (Sucks that gas, repairs, insurance, and registration then ate even more of my paycheck, but that's another rant.) To be sure, I still now experience discontent, anxiety, stress and other things in life even though money is no longer making my choices for me. But, yeah, money is not the one calling the shots. It's easy to in fact look back on those impoverished times and feel like they were somehow less stressful, and I felt less anxiety and discontent then than I have in the decades following. I'm not sure if that's the big lie we tell ourselves or if instead it is correct: either because money then was such an overarching issue that all other issues had to "get in line", or because when life boiled down to work-school-rent there really were no other 2nd-order "Maslowian" needs that I could be bothered to trifle with. |