zlacker

Bull. This is such a boring way to look at life. You can’t go on ‘vacation’ unless you’ve reached a certain (extremely high) level of material success? Maybe if you think of vacation as a place you go for a little while, eat nice food, stay in an Airbnb, and when you come home, your dog is waiting for you at the pet hotel to go back to your condo where all your stuff, subscriptions, job and ‘real life’ is still waiting as if you never left.

Even with very little means you can travel and see the world. It’s just a matter of priorities and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. If you think you have to establish the standard life package first and then go see the world when you have spare time and money, sure, maybe you won’t until you’ve made it pretty far. Right out of high school, instead of going to university, I decided to travel abroad. I didn’t have family money. I’m from a poor family in a small town. I just saved a little money working service jobs and traveled on the cheap. CouchSurfing, hitchhiking, camping out, hostels, etc. I’m not special. My little sister is doing the same thing now on waitress money. I’ve met countless people out on the road living interesting and meaningful lives, traveling abroad without being a single, full-time tech worker. You just have to ask yourself whether you need to compete materially with everyone who’s staying in one place and accumulating stuff.

To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it. Consider a few great authors, like Orwell for example. As a broke 20 something he was tramping around living a series of great stories. If he’d chosen to play it safe, stay home and work at some Important Career and collecting stuff, he’d probably never have gone to Spain in 1936, and the world would probably never have received his most important works as a result.

>>eloisi+(OP)
> To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it.

How does one live this lifestyle with children and/or other dependents, such as an elderly & infirm parent or a permanently-disabled sibling?

A lack of obligations is another kind of wealth; a privilege, even. I guess only people like you can afford to rise above this "poverty of spirit".

>>acuozz+i82
You've made quite a leap from what I said (travel, even extensive travel, isn't a pleasure reserved for high-income tech workers) to taking care of infirm or permanently disabled family members. Why not bring up 95-year-old diabetics? They certainly can't hop on a plane to go hitchhiking across Europe. There's always someone worse off, I never said _anyone_ can do it, but it's far less exclusive than Cthulu_ makes it sound.

By the way, children are a choice in most cases. If you decide to have children in your twenties, I agree, you won't have the same flexibility that I had. That's kind of the point of what I wrote: you can pick your priorities in life. Career and children are a popular priority, but that doesn't mean everything else in life has to be a nice-to-have that you can only consider once you have the house and kids. Orwell wasn't caring for a toddler while he and his wife were fighting in Catalonia.