Should You Make your Life Harder?

The answer to this should be obvious...and yet people constantly make their lives harder than they need to be. Maybe it's America's Protestant origins, maybe there was some natural selection for industriousness during the neolithic era, but whatever the cause, the lives of other people (not mine) could be a lot easier.

The best things in my life didn't require long hours grinding away at dull, hard work. In fact, the dull, hard work offered few rewards. I spent four and a half miserable years in engineering school only to graduate and find the market was flooded with mechanical engineers. My school advised...more school. Which I went in for--and amazingly, it didn't create a job opening. I finally switched to admin work--which didn't even require a college degree--and finally enjoyed a steady paycheck. I traded my arduous diet and exercise regime for a low-carb diet and lost 20 pounds and a gaggle of health problems. I sold my ridiculously overpriced house in Denver, decamped to Indianapolis, and got a paid-for house and an amount of cash it would have taken me 20 years to save. Taking advantage of opportunities has gotten me a lot further than hard work, and yet most people thought I was nuts for doing the things that got me ahead.

If success was about hard work, wouldn't roofers, prep cooks, and former honor students be the most successful people out there? And yet in so many areas, people aren't working smarter, but harder. Examples, in more or less chronological order:

Baby showers. Between the special invitations, special food, special games, special party favors, etc., the time and effort involved in putting these on has run amok. A shower is supposed to help a pregnant friend get a stash of baby stuff (avoiding the baby industrial complex) while having a party. Now it's a failure if it doesn't look like something from Instagram.

School. It was shorter and involved a lot less homework when I was a kid, and yet kids' test scores were at least as good as they are now. I'm reading Free to Learn, whose author argues that K-12 schools are basically prisons. He discusses the Sudbury School (where he sent his son), a democratic school with no lessons or grades, where the kids are responsible for their own education. Surveys of graduates show (he says) that they've gone on to college or trades with little difficulty. Even the curmudgeonly Dr. Thomas Sowell has said, "Eight years of genuine education -- without touchy-feely mush and trendy social projects -- would leave teenagers free to get out into the real world, where they could grow up." Whether it's a get-out-of-jail early card, or a project to stop making school a jail, it sounds good to me.

Childhood/Adolescence. Our environment is about as safe as it's ever been, and yet kids are thought (and in some places legally required) to need constant supervision. And kids are supposed to be herded into organized activities. This has to be as hard on parents as it is on kids. Five A.M. swimming practice? That's the middle of the night on my schedule. If it was my kid, I'd tell him get a new hobby or get himself to the pool at that hour. Eight hundred dollars a season for football? I've never had an eight-hundred-dollar-a-season hobby, and I work for a living. As for kids being shoehorned into hated activities that are "for their own good," I've written about my experience with piano lessons. Google "hate piano lessons" and you'll find almost nothing but articles on coaxing, cajoling and prodding to "save" your kid from quitting lessons now instead of later. Everybody quits eventually, though. Some adults say they wish their parents had forced them to keep taking lessons, but how many of these regretful adults have taken up their instrument again? Good for any of them who have, but without a doubt they're a small minority.  Here's what I'd do with a piano if I had one.

College: We're already glutted with college graduates. We're even glutted with STEM graduates. College has gotten outrageously expensive. So why are people spending their time and money on college when coding doesn't require a degree, transmission mechanics make $80,000 per year in Indianapolis, and skilled tradesmen in Denver have a month-long backlog? If you want to learn a more academic subject, go to a community college (you might find the same instructors there that you'll find at the university), take an online course, join a discussion group, or go to the library. If kids at the Sudbury School can take charge of their education, so can you.

Vehicles: See Should you Buy an SUV. (TLDR: most people don't need one.)

Weddings: See Baby Showers (times ten) above.

Housing: What is housing for? A place to be safely out of the elements, a place for privacy, a place to store your things and probably to cook and eat your meals. It should be a place to restore yourself, in a neighborhood where you get along with others reasonably well. Why do we need to tear out the kitchen wall, install granite counter tops, throw out perfectly good appliances for stainless steel ones and buy white slipcovers in frequent need of washing and ironing in a house the size of a bed and breakfast?

Diet: Great-grandma probably knew what constituted a good diet. Then along came the USDA diet recommendations, billions of dollars in research, followed by an epidemic of diabetes and obesity, among other illnesses. Finally, common sense returned in the form of low-carb diets--or at least the knowledge that starchy and sugary food raises blood sugar and insulin, causing the aforementioned problems. There also came the paleo diet, eliminating or reducing neolithic and industrial foods like grains, dairy and oils from non-oily plants (like corn oil, canola oil, soybean oil) that some people's genes never adapted to. Pretty simple, right? But now keto (very high fat, hard to do and originally for epilepsy) and whole food keto are all the rage. Granted, the food supply is trickier than when great-grandma was around. But do very many of us really need to be eating nothing but whole foods or a ketogenic diet?

Aging: We're not going to live forever. At a certain point in life, it's a kindness to your loved ones to make out a will, power of attorney, etc., move to a place you can take care of (or maintain with a little help), and make a plan for the day you can't take care of yourself anymore. This is exactly the opposite of what my parents did, and it was an absolute nightmare. It was no fun for them, either. Having no plan and no cash, they'd have had to move to a room in a house if my dad hadn't died when he did. Nobody should go through what I did with them, and so even at my age--I'm only 50--I have my shit together so that my POA's job will be as easy as possible.

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Some people say that very successful people say no to almost everything. I think it's clear that saying no to throwing time, money and energy to a bunch of useless bullshit and instead doing little things that make a big difference can make your life a lot better.

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