09-06-2020, 03:31 PM
Ammo wrote:
It was so much easier for kids to get launched when I was a young adult. Those of us who were able to do it when we were young need to remain humble about it.
That's what I've been told numerous times over the last couple decades. I'd still like to see hard data on that idea that "it was so much easier for kids (me) to launch."
I just don't know if that's really true. Case in point: in my last year of high school, every day after school, I would hustle quickly a half mile to a main road where I'd hitchhike 5 miles to a restaurant, where I'd work until 11pm each night, 36 hours a week, washing dishes. I'd then hitchhike back home, and get up and do it again. This wasn't weird, and at the time I didn't see it as hard. It was just the only way I knew how to get a nest egg together so I could get out of the house after graduation. The next fall, I hitchhiked with two duffle bags and a pair of skis/poles 1100 miles across the country to Breckenridge, Colorado. I'd never been there, had no contacts, but I just wanted to be a ski bum. I rented a tiny room in a basement with a cold shower and would daily bum rides up to the ski area, looking and begging for work. I lived on canned beans and boiled potatoes.
I have a dozen other stories like this peppered over the next few years, and I know many of my friends had similar stories. (hitchhiking down to Texas to look for and find a job as a custom wheat cutter, etc). I never purchased prepared coffee or paid for a restaurant meal until I was just shy of 21 years old.
I don't see a lot of that kind of bootstrap risk taking in many young people.