[confidantlake]

You don't sound at all like a terrible person, in fact I think this is a fairly common experience. My grandpa told me a very similar story about freezing his ass off in a far north oil town and seeing how the foremen lived compared to him. That spurred him to go to college and live a much nicer life.

I went through a smaller version of that myself, working at a shitty job in the lifeguard in the hot sun as a teen. Saw people who were 30 or 40 still working there. I knew I did not want it to be me. Got a degree, ended up at an underpaid part time office job, starting at 6 am every morning. But a few guys there had full time jobs that paid well and started at 9. Those were the programmers. Decided that was the road to go, went back to school and joined the good life.

[gibspaulding]

Not too different a story here. I worked for a roofing company through college. It was a good job in many ways. It was a union shop so benefits/safety/etc were great, and journeyman scale was actually more than I make now. It would have been a great gig through my twenties, but I had coworkers tell me over and over to stay in school and that I didn't want to end up like them.

I got a degree in Math and a minor in CS thanks to income based scholarships, but ended up bouncing around for a while in various IT and computer adjacent jobs not making a ton of money, and not loving being cooped up inside, so I sometimes wonder if I'd have been better off just accepting a apprenticeship, but I've been working towards "the good life" as you say, so in the long run I think college will have been the right choice.

[alexjplant]

I was dropping fry baskets and doing IT work for $5 an hour at a restaurant when I was 12 years old. Unfortunately I wasn't cognizant enough at that age to determine my career trajectory on the basis of which type of work I enjoyed... it was more that I was a lot better at configuring networking on the computer in the back than I was at making Reubens as a line cook.