Five-figure student loan right here.  [Shrug.]  At this point debt is like breathing – be more surprised if it all came to a sudden stop.

Like many people, or some people, or a few people, or maybe just me (heh) I stopped and started more than once with the whole educational/career-direction/findwayfeedself experience.  And – as I’ve said to myself on several occasions during the many discussions we’ve shared – failure is not the lack of success but the unwillingness to make the attempt. 

So with that in mind I realize I have been universally successful in every effort, in all that I have tried, even though the achievement of my actual goal may still prove to be a bit more illusive. 

However, discovering what you can do is of secondary importance to discovering what you won’t do … and during my early work life I found the only way I could despise the 9-to-5 (or 8:30-to-5 or 9:00-to-5:30 or whatever clock lock box of the employer) more is if I was required to set myself ablaze before each shift. 

My philosophy?  Employer has work.  Employee has … hands.  Employer needs job done.  Employee needs food eat, and Employer pays Employee in exchange for hands doing work.  Once hands complete work, work is done … Employee free to wander until Employer has more work, and pays Employee to keep hands ready for when Employer has work. 

Employers (a bit like creditors here, hmmmyes?) tend to differ, however. 

Employers like face time, and busy work, and staff meetings, because the work employees are hired to do is but a divvy slice of the adulting relationship between employer and employee … and — again for many, not all, but too much — no one knows this when embarking on the whole findwayfeedself experience.

So over the years I put on a few uniforms, drove a couple different vehicles. There aren’t many ways to try on careers, see what fits, what to put back on the shelf … say, if a person spends four years on a bachelor’s, four years in medical school, and then during residency discovers an intense dislike for, say, patients – like the momma cat to the kitten who complained of sour milk / tough titty lil kitty.

Good luck with findwayfeedself and repaying that $300,000 spent to discover what you don’t want to do.

Consequently, educational debt from student loans becomes just one more step in adulting … as one continues to muddle through to find one’s way.

And here I am with the luxury of choice; my parents gifted me a bachelor’s, and any ongoing education was supported mostly by freemunnies with minimal monkey, considering.  I personally know (knew?) an actual human with student loan debt greater than my personal Gorilla of Foolishness, with a monthly banana of about $1500. 

Ewww.

And this same human told me with words from this human’s mouth that this human was STILL able to get a mortgage of more than a half mil (even with quarter mil of student loans) because – and this is the funny part – the mortgage lender said:  “that’s good debt.”  Like, somehow, the money owed to that creditor for that debt will come … from … some? … where? that’s not in the household income THAT WILL BE USED TO PAY BACK THE MORTGAGE AND THE STUDENT LOANS ok I’m shouting.  But only in frustration.

Money.  Is.  Not.  Math.

This human was looking at a debt monkey moving into the ¾ mil range – that $750,000 for you lawyers – making the same money at the time, and even as irresponsible and disrespectful to money as I am I know I would not even attempt to feed a debt monkey that much, and carry a debt monkey that big. 

This human and I came from similar backgrounds, both members of the striving class – school debt is good debt … the cost of education is an investment in yourself … a higher degree is the price of admission to the middle class – and our generation (not to make excuses but to EXPLAIN) was lied to.

Propaganda promotes the ideal that higher education is the solution when it is nothing more than an alternative, and the social stigma associated with “blue collar” – i.e., those jobs that don’t require six-figure loan debt – is, I think, intentional.

Half, again, is smarter than me (aside from the whole “I do” in front of everyone and the paperwork) because Half does not have student loans.  Half ground Half’s way up from the dregs of a single-digit, hourly wage to uppermidclass crustiness, and (I honestly believe CHANGE MY MIND) that Half not buying into this fiction that a better life equals material life that requires higher debts instilled in Half an astute sense of the value of a dollar … one I envy, and am trying to learn. {Prov. 12:4]

Student loans are not real. The money isn’t real. The DEBT is, no question, but the funds you never held were shifted from a financial institution to an educational one, and the value of what was received in exchange remains negligible, particularly if you cannot findwayfeedself utilizing that pricey degree.

But! You did go to college, have the hard paper to prove it, so that’s there.