What you refuse to acknowledge is that our economy is diverse and performs like a team. There are no handouts unless you're on some kind of welfare. Never took an unemployment check. Don't even know what food stamps look like.
And that's great. If you are a conscientious tax paying citizen like most of us, then good on you.
I do remember a post a while back though about how you were considering going on benefits after you quit your gainful employment, and then wanted your wife to quit her job at the same time so she could stay home with the baby. To some of us, benefits are for a temporary support system when you lose your job involuntarily or due to circumstances beyond your control, like sickness or an accident. I would find a fast food job before I went on benefits if I were healthy and able to work - working a job like that or on a farm or on a road crew in Texas in July is a motivating factor to speed up the "what do I want to be" discussion. Now, obviously we find out that you didn't do that, but you never said otherwise until now.
But all that aside - what really chaps me about your little ongoing narrative is that you are SO damn condescending from your little pedestal in your attitude towards those of us who, like the majority of working Americans, have regular corporate jobs. It's your attitude that annoys the crap out of me. It's not enough that you don't think you could manage a regular job - you have to bash those of us who HAVE figured it out how to manage it in a successful manner - oh how boring, oh how pedantic, oh how monotonous, too much stress, too much pressure... and you have no frame of reference for making any of those statements since by your own admission, you have never held a regular 9-5 job. My point all along, which YOU seem to have missed, is that even though it isn't for you, it is obviously working for the rest of us, so until you have experienced it, shut up about it! Even if work is not the touchy feely happy happy every single day, that is not a realistic expectation for ANY job. Maybe my skin is just thicker than yours, but a bad day at work doesn't mean I go home and have to talk myself out of jumping off the roof. I go home, exhale, and enjoy with my family the creature comforts that job brought me.
It's great that you want to be in academia (I guess that's the plan today?) because the world needs teachers, but sometimes I think that academic types would benefit from a year or two in the "real world" so that they aren't just teaching abstract theory written by other sheltered academics who also have no real world experience and have never tested their academic based theories. Who makes a better business teacher? A guy who has written some scholarly papers on mergers and acquisitions based on research of real world examples, or the guy who, as CEO of a Fortune 500 company, actually participated in a multi-million dollar merger? Real world trumps theory every day.
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