No… keeping a job and paying the bills so you don’t end up homeless and starving, is the hardest part. A rather small percentage of the total population ever achieves financial security.

If you’re late 3 times, fired. Sometimes only once. If you don’t like shaving, or skip it on a day that the boss feels like being a jerk, fired. If you don’t happily smile and pour your entire being into work you don’t agree with, which you’re only doing because it’s the only available way to survive… fired.

Even if you ace school and go to college and get a degree, your life still might never amount to anything. This world is what it is because of our parents, and their parents, and their parents… and, to a lesser degree, because of us.

The problem is that kids really don’t yet know any better, and so it is the duty of the parents to adequately prepare them for real life. Most parents shirk this responsibility, and then act appalled that, somehow, everything doesn’t turn out alright. They refuse to look at their own actions in the past, as the cause of the effects they have manifested… and so it falls on us to do so.

We have to make this world what it should be, or it will not be that.

And you may have noticed, even at such a young age, that “making the world what it should be,” is a profoundly, prohibitively difficult task. How can we even begin to do that, with so many people so convinced by whatever, that the world should be something entirely wrong, far removed from what is actually right, based on their own misguidance and misunderstandings, and most likely, the things their parents either didn’t know, or didn’t care, to teach them correctly?

You’re not going to change your parents’ values, nor their behavior.

The only thing you can do is change what you do, and why.

The best you can do is learn whatever you need to learn, to enable you to support yourself independently, with as few obligations from anyone else, as possible. That way, you’ll have the most control over who you choose to be.

Life might suck until you can do that… but that’s just the way this world was built by those who came before us. We don’t have a choice but to either mesh with it, or survive outside it, or change it.

These next few years will fly by, especially if you dedicate your time to learning what it takes to support yourself in the future. I suggest you spend your youth on learning how to be an independent adult. Once you’re grown and on your own, you’ll find an entirely new and different set of problems, almost all of which require money, to even have a chance to solve.

Learn the harsh lessons as young as possible, so you have as much time as possible to adjust, to discover and implement solutions.