To summarize my youth: the only stuff I learned, outside of school, was taught to me by my brothers, in the form of bullying.
I was the youngest.
What I’m most annoyed by is that my dad, a teacher, with a bachelor’s in bookkeeping, taught me exactly nothing about money.
They fed me, and I got older, but I raised myself. I learned how to handle my own finances, and live on my own, because they certainly didn’t help me in that regard, and when I found myself basically on my own at 16, after my parents divorced and I was essentially abandoned, I had to sort my shit out damn fast. It was sink or swim.
Obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll tell you this: as a teenager, I had no goddamned idea how to shop for groceries, or cook for myself.
I try not to bitch about it too much because that was more than 20 years ago now. I don’t want to compare my challenges to anyone else.
My entire point is that, I wasn’t taught anything. I figured it out without any help. The difference between a man, and a child who got older, is whether you taught yourself how to be self sufficient, when everyone else decided that you were old enough to know everything you needed to know, when nobody has actually explained anything to you about how to survive, then pushed you out the door… If you experienced that, and you figured it out. Welcome to adulthood, congrats. If you were never in a situation where if you missed a couple of shifts at work, you’d have to sleep under a bridge, then, IDK. Sounds a bit pampered to me.
To summarize my youth: the only stuff I learned, outside of school, was taught to me by my brothers, in the form of bullying.
I was the youngest.
What I’m most annoyed by is that my dad, a teacher, with a bachelor’s in bookkeeping, taught me exactly nothing about money.
They fed me, and I got older, but I raised myself. I learned how to handle my own finances, and live on my own, because they certainly didn’t help me in that regard, and when I found myself basically on my own at 16, after my parents divorced and I was essentially abandoned, I had to sort my shit out damn fast. It was sink or swim.
Obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll tell you this: as a teenager, I had no goddamned idea how to shop for groceries, or cook for myself.
I try not to bitch about it too much because that was more than 20 years ago now. I don’t want to compare my challenges to anyone else.
My entire point is that, I wasn’t taught anything. I figured it out without any help. The difference between a man, and a child who got older, is whether you taught yourself how to be self sufficient, when everyone else decided that you were old enough to know everything you needed to know, when nobody has actually explained anything to you about how to survive, then pushed you out the door… If you experienced that, and you figured it out. Welcome to adulthood, congrats. If you were never in a situation where if you missed a couple of shifts at work, you’d have to sleep under a bridge, then, IDK. Sounds a bit pampered to me.