Yeah we all think this, jumping out of tech and buying a transam and taking a relaxing job and smoking pot when our wives aren't around.
Anyway, remind yourself of how you couldn't afford that $80-150/mo gym/class. How you didn't go on a real vacation for years because it took 8mo+ to save up for one. How you probably drove a car that constantly broke down because you couldn't get a loan on something decent. How you had to save money from your $6/hr job to eat Burger King on your lunch break across the street. How a huge chunk of your income went into driving yourself to work (gas/maintenance). How you couldn't afford a place without 3-4 roommates. How you went for years without buying a set of 4 tires, instead buying 1 used tire to replace your bald tire before the police/rain gets you.
I'll take the 150k stresses over my previous $6-12/hr stresses where I felt like I was spinning tires and never, ever going to get out of that.
I'm guessing you’ve never lived on welfare. Having done that and had a.personal income that, while short of $150K, is a sizable fraction of it (and been everywhere in between), increasing real income has involved a monotonically increasing quality of life. I’m definitely into the range, even short of $150K, where the marginal difference from each additional $ of income is much smaller than at lower levels, but it is still not negative.
What’s wrong with paying money so others can live? I see a lot of life as chance. I’m lucky that I grew up upper middle class with parents who paid for college. Now I got a cushy job as a software engineer. I could have just as easily been born to a family with 0 wealth and had to start working at a young age and do that until I died. Why shouldn’t we have a safety net to at least cushion the blow of getting a bad dice roll at birth?
I grew up poor, was homeless at 16 for a year while still trying to go to HS, eventually had to drop out and climb up the career ladder with no formal education, now make well into 6 figures and I'm more than happy to help people NOT have to go through my situation. You should be as well. I am beyond lucky that I dug myself out of that hole and I know other people will not have my luck. If I didn't start programming as a kid because my school got computers early I would probably be in retail still.
Again, voluntarily sure. I view redistribution of wealth via force to be a net negative on the wealth of society.
> evidently your luck, as well.
I worked at a Burger King, a hardware store, an apartment complex (plumbing toilets and whatnot), and finally put my self through college. It was an exhausting climb the whole way and I _worked_. I was never let go, and I hardly (like a $1500 a pell grant once) received assistance because I _made too much_ in my day job when I finally did go to school.
I wasn't terribly lucky other than I `lucked` into a work ethic and I `lucked` into being born in a country that still had enough of a free market that I _could_ work my way up.
And thinking on it now I don't think I was that well served by my schooling. I feel if anything I was held back in an _almost_ deliberate effort to homogenize me.
Dead people's families can. The parent poster talked about being `lucky` in that his parents could pay for his college. I want my kids to be `lucky` enough to afford housing and _if they really want_ college.
You're spending a portion of what you make to stabilize society and prevent poverty-driven riots across the country during a global pandemic. There's nothing out of control about it