Maggie's Farm

Have you noticed the bulk of the internet it taken up with upper middle class angst? Follow your passion? That is only an option for those with rich daddies. Poor people get jobs and follow GoneWithTheWind's trajectory. Oh, I suppose to an extent people follow their passion, but then she gets pregnant so job, married, kids...midlife crisis.

But if you want to "follow your passion" and you haven't stumbled across it, you might want to make your passion learning. Then whatever job or assignment you end up in, there are things to learn so you can be passionate.

Heck, even if you end up in solitary confinement prohibited books or other media, you can seek new knowledge from synthesizing what you already know.

Not just what money is and how it works but how life is and how it works.

Fundamentally, at some point and really the earlier the better, a person must begin to do something others find useful. If you are wealthy, you can do that by purchasing or hiring others but if you are not heavy on cash, your time and effort must be spent doing something useful for others. Big, caveat, it must be something they find useful and are willing to pay you to do. Deciding the homeless need a place to hold a drum circle so the taxpayers should build a "meeting place", isn't going to meet the criteria.

But kids, more today than in the past, are not taught to do things useful to others. They, again we are talking about middleclass brats, do things they want and that they find useful. The majority aren't even required to clean their rooms. They are shuttled from on "kid experience" event to another.

Then in college they are led into majors that again do nothing useful for others. They are coddled and told to find their passion. They are taught to gaze a their navel.

Now, graduated, they find to get this money that has always rained from the heavens, they must figure out how to do something useful for others, even if they aren't passionate about it or even if they hate doing the task.

But we don't teach kids about money, we don't teach them to study, we don't teach them responsibility, we don't teach them how to write, we don't teach them how to show up on time, we don't teach them... So the question is, what are we teaching them?