this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Losing everything. My family wasn't rich but it was well off, and in my young stupidity I thought we deserved to live better than others did because we worked hard (had a family business).
Turns out hard work means almost jack shit. I mean, I'm good now because I have very marketable skills and I do work hard at a job not many want to do, but it takes me around the world and I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.
This is the biggest difference between myself and my brother.
My dad is fairly well off having run a company for decades at this point and I knew I didn't want to lean on that. So I went on my own career path.
My brother decided to join the family company. Over the past 20 years he was gifted 50 percent of the company as a bonus. He didn't understand that he's only in that situation because the owner was his dad. He's never understood how big of a safety net the two of us had growing up. He genuinely thinks that his hard work is the sole reason for his position in life and that anybody that's willing to work as hard as he did (and he did, I won't deny it) would be on a similar situation as himself.
The luck factor is also called opportunity. People succeed financially because they had some opportunity arise that enabled the success to be a possibility. Be it a random chance that they were given a job interview, that their dad owns a company they can start at, or they happened to grow up in an area with good education options they could lean on to develop skills, or just a serious safety-net.
I had option 2 and 4, but used option 3 to eventually get option 1. I'm mostly unsatisfied with the world because I wish everybody had option 3 and 4 to start with regardless of family.
Now my friend, you are wiser than ever before!
It's called "Ecclesiastes 9:11"
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
This, too... how you are born dictates how (routes) to get to the riches. (Thats why some connections are useless) still; luck will find you wherever and whoever you are, its up to you to grab it firm.
You needed a 2000 year old book to tell you that hard work and intelligence matters very little in comparison to luck lol? How much money mommy and daddy have are the only thing that matters in the capitalist arrangement of the economy.
The source is irrelevant to the topic. Do you actually disagree with the quote? Do you have further to add to the conversation?
And it has come from a 2,000 year old letter. You would have had no issue with the quote had it not been included in the bible.
You have added no wisdom here. Militant atheists waving their virtual dicks around about how enlightened they are is not among the things I miss from Reddit.
We didn't miss you either.