My dad likes to remind me of how much better my job is than what I could be doing.
He's done construction work all of his life, and self-employed construction for as long as I've been alive. Growing up, I often worked for him during the summers after school was out. I've done all manner of construction work under him, concrete work, plumbing, roofing, decks, fences, you name it.
He claims now that he had me doing all that so that I'd want to go to college and get a desk job, and maybe he's telling the truth. There have been some things I remember fondly about those days, but overall, there's no comparison. We have it a lot easier.
Yeah, that perspective is crucial, I think. When I was a teenager I worked at TJ Maxx for gas money. Retail/customer service type work can be and often is humiliating and somewhat dehumanizing, and of course it pays jack.
I have coworkers who not only didn't do that, they didn't work anywhere else professionally before coming to their jobs at our cushy employer. They're kind of double-screwed: they don't know how sweet this job is vs other jobs doing similar work, and they don't know how much they should be getting paid for it. So they have good jobs, that they bitch about, for which they get paid half or 60% of what they should be getting. (The pay isn't why they bitch, they don't even know they're getting underpaid.)
He's done construction work all of his life, and self-employed construction for as long as I've been alive. Growing up, I often worked for him during the summers after school was out. I've done all manner of construction work under him, concrete work, plumbing, roofing, decks, fences, you name it.
He claims now that he had me doing all that so that I'd want to go to college and get a desk job, and maybe he's telling the truth. There have been some things I remember fondly about those days, but overall, there's no comparison. We have it a lot easier.