hindsight2020

From a self-employment perspective, aka the cotton-candy happy land of CNN talking heads telling every unemployed manual laborer the key to all their problems is a simple choice of "start your own business, presto!", then yeah, you're right. Personally I blame it on my father really, if he hadn't been so freggin' low middle class I would have been able to charge at life going full AB, gambling my rent check at every corner, getting my money in every ponzi scheme and reinventing the business model 10 times a day, selling people pet rocks and slappin' an iPod logo on it, chase every hot tail without abandon just because she's hot THAT day, all this KNOWING at the end of the day I can fail miserably and not remove a single crumb of bread from my mouth. Alas, I wasn't born with a safety net of capital to enact the garbage mantra that seeks to minimize the time-sensitive nature of a lifespan and the finite number of opportunities that exist in a median person's life, absent a safety net. I guess my father wasn't so ill-providing after all.

Ergo, for the rest of the working stiffs working in the real world of scarcity of resources and life inequities, you dang right it's a seniority system; it's worse than that, it's an outright Visa "line of people" commercial , waiting for the dope ahead of ya to break a hip going down the stairs. People who challenge this notion are just uncomfortable with the idea of being disposable. Pilots of all people should be intimately cued in to the disposable nature of our labor value. We train and strive to become carbon copies of each other.

Can I depart the proverbial fix early and gamble my rent check for the sake of my wealth accumulation not hinging on the scarcity imposed by another human being competing for the same job I need? Sure. But when I fail at it there's no amount of "pep talk" that's going to save me from my inability to take care of my basic needs. Even in social safety net europe I would be averse to taking such a liberal approach to my livelihood. In "the heck with you, I got mine" America? Forget it, that's asking to get made an example out of.

This is not just aviation. Goverment jobs are this way, private jobs have similar dynamics. This is not to say the notion of self-employed financial independence is strictly mythical, it is just that it is largely placed in improper context, by highlighting the outlandish outcomes without giving proper weight and attention to the initial conditions and backings that are usually in place for the median successfully self-employed person to get to that condition. As such, it reads like a brochure with none of the disclaimers.

As always YMMV, for the majority, we agree to disagree, from a labor standpoint, life is quite indeed a line at the walmart......