Comment: Re:Shorter answer (Score 1) 121
But that's a terrible analogy - aside for having no cars at all in it, most people win this lottery. When you have say, 20% saying "the system is rigged, it's all a scam", 60% working and content, and 20% saying "this sucks, but it's my own fault", it's hard to justify the first group.
It's equally hard to justify saying "it's their own damn fault" when such a large number of people are falling into the first and third categories.
Look, when I was young the single biggest thing keeping me down was the idea that a regular full-time job was some sort of scam, and it was only once I got over that that my life went anywhere.
Well, I thought that way twenty years ago, and I still think that way, and I'm still mostly a success. It's just that now I see more clearly how the powerful and influential wield their power - when I was young I never had such depth of thought. So, I decided that I'd simply try to become one of "them", and that's working out quite well
I see a lot of people who expected to just walk into a middle-class lifestyle straight out of college, and who are upset there's no "good" job waiting for them.
I haven't seen that in the last ten years; my perception matches just about everyone else who replied to you. To whit, there are no jobs, except for a few lucky enough to be connected (where I am unemployment is around the 25% mark, with you unemployment closer to 60%. A full 80% of graduating high-schoolers don't get jobs immediately after finishing school, thus they cannot finance themselves into a college.
It doesn't work that way - but that doesn't mean the "good" job doesn't exist, just that college didn't get you there, there are more steps to take first.
Look, I come from a poor background (think typical African township, with poultry flapping around when cars backfire and children running barefoot in dirt roads). When I left high-school I was lucky enough to get a job in a textile factory (working 7 nights a week, from 19h00 to 07h00) for around $20 USD a week. The only way to survive was to continue living with my parents. I used the income from that job to embark on a correspondence study course, and after the first year of computer science and maths was lucky enough to be hired at the local university. From there on in I just jumped from job to job every five years or so, upgrading each time.
However, I acknowledge that I was lucky to get that first job. Many of my mates from high-school only got jobs years later (some never - they did the best they could growing vegetables and whatnot). Had I not gotten lucky with that first factory job then I wouldn't have been here today typing this and trying to convince you that, no, it's not just your mindset, it's mostly luck when you're young. When there are 200 qualified applicants for 2 positions, then it merely comes down to who gets lucky.