Lots of things this topic could touch on. Here's one:
Back when I was a kid, I was pretty naive about "the real world". I did start working after school and summers starting at 14 with a gig in the pilot year of the Youth Conservation Corps in Idaho City, Idaho, a quasi military sort of a Junior Forest Service summer program where we did a different job each week for seven weeks, ranging from trail maintenance to collection of wild plants for restoration work to gathering bitterbrush seeds for deer habitat improvement. After that I got a job for three years at a local greenhouse, nersery, floral operation, mostly "fixing glass", pulling weeds, and mixing dirt. My Dad was a career Mountain States telephone and telegraph employee, retiring after 37 years with "the Company", and Mom was a classic housewife turned lunch lady at a nearby grade school. Dad was handy and we did lots of projects around the house, I bought an old Jeep at 16 that we rebuilt, including an engine swap from the Willys four-banger to a Ford six. Always had a family garden, too.
I had always been a mountain boy, the family did a lot of camping and hunting, and I had vague aspirations to be a Jeremiah Johnson sort. I was a top student in school, though I couldn't say that I liked it all that much - but it was easy. Sports, orchestra, regular stuff - I was 4.0 (that was before you could get higher scores) - I got the second highest SAT scores in the state the year I took them, which got me a national merit scholarship, and I was interviewed by recruiters from Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton. But none of that meant much to me, I didn't have any real ambitions, and was so naive that I was actually worried about being able to make a living in the "real world".
My best friend's father was career military, and he used to talk about trying for a military academy appointment- four years of free school, twenty years service, then retire at 42 on the half pay of a captain (Navy) - the retirement was more than my Dad was making 25 years into his career. That relaxed my fears about making a living and I thought it would be great to do whatever the hell I wanted without working from 42 on. It was also somewhat of a motivator that the Vietnam war was still going and I had a lottery number that was sure to be a winner, so joining seemed like a better choice than being drafted. I applied and got two appointments to the Naval Academy and one to the Coast Guard Academy - I accepted the one from Senator Frank Church to the USNA. The full-ride National Merit Scholarship just evaporated.
Two months in and I had become painfully aware that the life of a navy officer was not for me, I pined for the mountains of Idaho. I realized that at 18 years old, my golden retirement was 24 years away, more life than I had already lived, to be spent doing things I had no interest in doing. As a smart guy with glasses, I was destined to be a nuclear engineer on some big boat or submarine. The cherry on top appeared during a field trip to an LST out in the Chesapeake Bay - everything was grey, the sky, the water, the boat, and it all smelled like diesel. Belowdecks we passed through the enlisted's berth and along a narrow passageway a black sailor on the top bunk said to me as I passed not a foot away, "Get out while you can, you stupid muthafukka!" I thought that was good advice. Coincidentally, the Vietnam conflict wound down at that time and my draft year was the first to not be called. It took another month to process out, during which I read the whole Tolkien series and ate some twenty large bags of M&Ms in my boxers while everyone else was doing Navy things.
I mistakenly thought that when I got back to Idaho I could get a job with the Forest Service, which was a misty part of my vague Jeremiah Johnson fantasy, but no such luck. The local University was already well into the first semester, so I went looking for a job. I landed one as a framing carpenter at minimum wage and worked at that until the next Fall when classes started again. Because of my academic history I felt compelled to pursue something in science or engineering, but still had no ambitions in those directions. I took the standard pre-engineering courses - calculus, electrical engineering, physics, along with some electives in geography, real estate, Chinese history, and a hippie thing lead by a gay guy called "Love and Sexuality", which was really out there for me. I had a 21 credit hour load, but school was still easy for me, and I continued to work part-time as a carpenter. The interesting thing is that, for the first time in my life, critical thinking began to be part of my consciousness, stirred mostly by the Love and Sexuality course - actually, I think, by the people who I was now associating with.
I reckon I've embarked on the 'walls of text' modality. Honest, this is all going to relate to the topic, but might take a few installments. I didn't have it all worked out in advance, so think of it as an adventure in discovering my concept of, "What is wealth? How is it made? How is it accounted?"
