Originally Posted by
Sunfish
Some people are hung up on the word “professional”. They have an emotional need for status. I grew up in an age when people looked up at professionals with university degrees and looked distastefully at “trades” and tradesmen. It was an understandable but short sighted idea. People assumed that “professionals”, (a) made more money and (b) were happier.
This was and is BS. while I was still a ragged university student, young tradesmen already had their second or third car, were paying off their first house and were thinking of wife and kids. As a professional engineer, I was at least six or seven years behind the kids who were apprenticed and earning at sixteen in terms of establishing an independent lifestyle and my own household. I have NEVER made up that gap and neither have many other professionals. It’s called discounted cash flow - you might pick up a six figure salary as a professional at the peak of your earning powers but that doesn’t make up for the years of relative poverty and stress to achieve it.
Furthermore there is a unique Australian associated problem - income tax. The tax scales don’t have any compensation for risk, investment and the stress involved in earning that big salary at all. You are better off earning less if you can get stable long term perhaps undemanding work rather than trying to make big bucks on the corporate high wire where one slip and....,,
‘’Try and forget the status / power / snobbery angle and find something that is personally satisfying.
I still remember the constant stream of suicides as students jumped off the ming wing when the tension between what they wanted to do and what their parents expected them to do became just too much.
That my friend, is a spot on post.