[cyber_kinetist]

Thinking about what huge sweeping world events happened from 1922 to 2022 and how it affected people around the world… for an ordinary person there’s really no point in making such a spreadsheet. (Well, unless you’re born in one of those filthy-rich elite families like the Rothschilds, who have all the power they need to plan ahead…) I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point. Only a few of us are going to buy an actual damn house at this rate nowadays.

I think it’s best to think that (for the majority) our very moment of our life is contingent on the historical forces of the world, and there is no stable-enough historical tendency that we can exploit to calculate out our whole life trajectories.

[lotsofpulp]

>I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point

The purpose is not to pinpoint whole life trajectories. Obviously predictions decades into the future are a crapshoot. But it does not cost anything to copy paste the formula down that many rows.

The purpose is to establish upper and lower bounds and adjust expectations properly. In the context of this thread, it does seem reasonable for a high schooler to be able to predict some spectrum of their quality of life if they were to pursue a PhD in <x> field.

Finding a partner, buying a home, having children, etc all happens within 10 to 20 years of high school. They can take their student loans, amortize them, and calculate if $70k/$100k/$120k/$250k per year will buy them the future they want. And they may decide that a PhD in whatever has too low of a probability of allowing them to achieve other goals they have, such as having kids or living in a certain region or owning a certain type of home.

And it goes beyond money. Kids should be taught to research or ask people what their day to day, month to month, year to year is like. A 16 year that wants to research medicine should get data from a 25/30/35 year old about what to expect, such as hours worked per week, vacation time, where the jobs are, job security, etc.

[cyber_kinetist]

You know all kinds of things can happen during a PhD right? Many don't even make it to the end, some get burnt out and leave without a degree (along with their career prospects), some meet abusive professors, some find themselves in illness (bonus points if you are in America, don't know wtf is happening with their healthcare system), some find their advisor suddenly leave academia and their lab fucking disappears (which I have experienced), etc.

Anyways, I think planning decades into the future to get what you want with a spreadsheet is only possible from a petit-bourgeois "middle-class" standpoint. From David Graeber's paper "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" [0], he talks about what that mentality is:

> What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)

And guess what, that middle class is shrinking (since the things that welfare capitalism has promised are starting to not be true anymore, like if you work hard enough you can buy a house and start a family...) Many people in first-world countries have already been woken out from that fantasy.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4....

[lotsofpulp]

I think we are talking past each other. I agree that life is volatile. And it is very lucky to be able to even plan a few years into the future.

But I do not think Graeber's quote is applicable here. The exercise of planning future cash flow can help you increase the quality of the bets you place (and/or adjust your expectations). Singular choices have no guaranteed results, but the sum total of choices can be influenced by gathering information about the world and keeping your models updated, allowing you to make choices where the odds are more favorable to you.