Will,

I am sorry to have caused you such anxiety. I can really feel the pain, the judging, and ultimately the resistance to my opinion in your post. It feels as if you wish to control me so that your idea of what is “right” is forcefully made to be the same . You will never succeed in this effort & you are wasting a great deal of energy on this. I would chalk this one up to one of life’s many lessons.

I suggest you develop a daily mindful meditation practice. This will help you quell your anxiety, the need to be “right”, and need to convince others to agree with your version of reality. You will see that we all believe ourselves to be the sole possessors of what is true and just.To be honest, I can’t help but feel that alot of your hatred is because I serve to in some ways hold up a mirror of reality of modern society to you — e.g. alot of meaningful jobs do not pay well to start (or ever), the US is full of rampant materialism, etc. You will realize that this is neither good or bad — it just is. Resisting it or ignoring it only serves to cause suffering. Being aware of it is the first step forwards freedom and breaking away from the “system” as you put it.

As far as me mentioning my wife in previous posts involving relationship issues of various OPs — I do that so people know I am a credible source (as is possible on an internet forum) and not some guy that hasn’t had a date in 9 months. You should never seek advice from someone that does not have what you seek. This is common sense advice. Hence the wise saying – “consider the source”.

In my post to this young man seeking advice, I attempted to convey the need to follow HIS dreams — and not to value the opinions of his well-meaning friends, family, and beautiful young women that will all be clambering for his attention over the next decade. The world is full of distractions. For example, my mother wanted me to be a veterinarian, my father a banker, my girlfriend at the time a CPA, my grandma a doctor, and my teammates a professional basketball player — when I was in college. I went through a similar situation to him when I was in school and had numerous options. Well meaning friends and family often serve to only confuse someone more when faced with difficult career decisions. You can’t make everyone happy and once I realized this my decisions became much more authentic and easier.

I did in some ways hark on the expectations and needs of some women is because for some men their love life is one of the highest priorities in life…. the dating scene IS different out of school. Many young women ARE looking for security. Many beautiful women DO expect to be taken care of. I do not judge this as right or wrong. Rather our state of reality – possibly as a product of thousands of years of evolution. What is the first question people ask you at a social gathering in the USA? “SO, what do you DO?”…. It was somewhat of a shock to me when I graduated a number of years back how much emphasis is placed on one’s career in the dating scene. This is useful advice but probably nothing the poster has never heard before. In sum, I was attempting to convey that if the OP wanted a family and kids by the age of 27 that he would need to have a relatively stable paying job by then. I was simply asking if he was OK with this… as he has been living in a proverbial bubble by living off has parents financially for some time now.

In sum, I attempted to advice the poster to follow his dreams and to be aware of common pitfalls of seeking meaningful work in a capitalistic world. If you think about it, my advice is not much different from the message conveyed in the Buddhist classic “Siddhartha’ by Herman Hess (1922) — in it, the young talented man (such as our poster) is distracted by a beautiful woman, earns money to win her heart (becomes a merchant), then falls into the pitfalls of pleasure seeking (riches, drugs, alcohol, etch) for a number of years- before finally coming full circle to become an enlightened humble man by the river. I suggest you read this book if you have not already.

The struggle for a man to stay true to oneself in a world full of distractions is not easy – this has been the case for centuries. I am sure similar distractions are readily available to the modern day woman as well but in our the case the OP is male.

Namaste