Website owner:  James Miller

A cold, hard, central fact of life

   The hard reality of life for most young men is that when they 
   finish school they will have to go to work at something to 
   support themselves; they will have to find a way to make a 
   living.  Most parents expect their sons to move out of the 
   house and earn their own living once they finish school.  In 
   the case of girls this is often the case, also.  Parents often 
   expect their daughters to move out of the house and support 
   themselves once they have finished school.  In some cases the 
   parents may allow their daughters to continue living at home 
   but still usually expect them to find a job and work.  It is 
   not at all surprising that things are this way.  It is the 
   natural order.  If one looks at nature, that is the way things 
   work.  If you consider the wild creatures of nature, whether 
   you are speaking of birds, wild animals, or whatever, when the 
   young reach maturity they will all leave their parents and go 
   out on their own to fend for themselves in this hard world.  
   They get weaned away from their parents and pushed from the 
   nest.  Yet, even though it is the natural order of things, this 
   can be a very stressful and hard experience for a young person.  
   Why?  Because there may not be very many jobs available out 
   there and there is no guarantee that the young person will be 
   able to find a job at all.  And if he is able to find a job it 
   may be a very low paying and ugly kind of job.  He might find 
   himself forced, through his need to eat, to take a job that he 
   absolutely detests and that hardly pays enough to live on.  And 
   he may find that he is unable to find anything better.  He may 
   go through a succession of jobs and find that each is as bad as 
   the others, that they are all hardly what he might have dreamed 
   of when he was younger.  He may come to realize that this can 
   be a very cold, hard, cruel world.  If he gets fired from a job 
   he could find himself out in the streets homeless.  All this is 
   especially true for a person not equipped with a good education 
   or profession.  If the person has only a high school degree or 
   less he is competing with the masses for bottom-of-the-line 
   jobs --- the worst, least satisfying kinds of jobs.  Life can 
   be hard for everybody and it can be especially hard for those 
   down at the bottom.  One can say that the central "fact of 
   life" in this world is the necessity of supporting yourself and 
   for many this fact can be a very cold and harsh one.  In 
   desperation those at the bottom may resort to all kinds of 
   things to survive, including crime, prostitution, etc..  A 
   great many people find life to be very hard just because of the 
   central "fact of life" of having to make a living; just because 
   they have to endure so much just to eat.   

   Feb 2003