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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Somebody should have counseled this lady before she chose this field in NYC. At least she should have reassessed every 5 years or so before she found herself there at 40. She is thinking too much about other people's money when she could have made better choices for herself. It sounds like she felt entitled to a NYC living. I mean, who does this to themselves for 20 years and then blames other people's money?[/quote]

Here's how this happens. It's not ultra common, but it does happen, and it's not so simple as "make better choices". Because many of the choices are made before the person has the necessary info, and often they are working on information that is bad or very misleading:

- Larla grows up in rural or remote part of the country. Low cost of living, middle or working class parents who don't struggle a ton to make ends meet because low COL. Larla has pleasant childhood without a lot of class strife thanks to this.

- Larla is very good at school, and opportunities in this area are limited. It's not near a larger city. The area doesn't have a ton of arts, culture, or commerce. Larla very quickly develops interest in leaving area because of these limitations and because they are very successful academically, this starts to feel like a real possibility.

- Larla goes to college far away, a "good school" likely with some or a lot of merit aid. Larla's grades and test scores qualified her for school, but her admission probably has a lot to do with her - background too -- these schools like diversity and being from some remote place stands out.

- Maybe the school is in a big city, but maybe in little college town, but either way, winds up in a student population with people from much more cosmopolitan backgrounds. Some are wealthy, some are UMC, some might be MC or WC but from places with greater diversity (of people and experiences). This means everyone understands a lot more about how the world works than Larla, even the other kids on financial aid and who have to work. Larla is straight up naive.

- Larla makes friends, and her friends educate her a bit about the world. The problem is, they are naive too, because they don't even understand what they know. They explain stuff to Larla, but it overemphasizes the fairness of the system. They gloss over stuff like the value of family connections or the fact that they are from families that really, really support and emphasize higher education (something Larla's family probably doesn't value to the same degree because of very different environments and circumstances). Larla starts to think she's figuring things out, but she's only getting a very small part of the picture.

- Larla makes career choices, decides where to move after school, based on her naive assumptions coupled with a pretty incomplete explanation of the world gleaned from young people who are really still just figuring it out. What Larla could really use at this point is a parent or relative who can say "Whoa, wait -- some of these kids have trust funds. Some of them can live in their aunt's apartment while they intern. Some of them have parents who will will do anything to cover the cost of a graduate degree because it's important to them. You need to make different choices based on your specific situation. How about Philly instead of NYC? How about marketing instead of publishing? Maybe what you really want is to write -- get an ed degree, teach high school English, and write! Or pursue an academic degree but get used to living in midwestern college towns, which are at least cheap."

- So instead, Larla figures this out on her own over the course of a decade or so. It's revealed in fits and starts, and often she only learns a key piece of information after it's too late to do much with it (like that an MFA is treated as required in publishing, but has no actual value in terms of earning, something that should actually be a required release of info before anyone enrolls in an MFA program). She also gets deeper into a career and social circle that will simply reinforce her value system, making it harder and harder to pull herself out. She might contemplate moving to Chicago or Portland or Denver, but her NY friends will say "OMG no, I could never" and she's only 28 and her family doesn't understand her anymore either, so she holds onto those values even though they don't serve her.

It's a sucky thing. Yes, she was naive and stupid and made bad choices. But it's also kind of hard to blame her because she's kind of been thrown to the wolves. Her university probably should have offered her some kind of practical economic education, but that would require being honest about their student body and their funding and the value of their degree, so: no. Same with the MFA. Her friends are self-interested in believing that they earned their way (to a degree they may have, in other ways not). Also, Larla doesn't have a stereotypical hard luck upbringing. She's not from poverty, her parents have steady jobs, she had a nice childhood. The fact that it in no way prepared her for the life she is now leading doesn't concern anyone because she is a [almost certainly white] middle class lady with a fancy college degree. It's just that none of those things are really helping her right now and she'd have to go back in time, or totally upend her entire values system, to change it. It's what she should do, but it's understandable that she is struggling.

I feel really bad for people in this situation. This is why it helps to have savvy parents who get how the world works, why you are lucky to find mentors or honest friends who tell it like it is. It can save you. Some people never get that and they get stuck.[/quote]

You’re giving larla too much of a pass. I was essentially like larla (but genuinely poor and with a lt least an iota of common sense.)  it would have been incredibly stupid for me to take this path (though I, too, love art history and avocado toast) so instead I majored in something practical and went to professional school while my roommate (also a larla) was running up credit card debt and having a great time. [/quote]

DP
Well, that is impressive.  Indeed, you must be quite the ambitious self-starter then, because back in the 1990s I was a Larla with hands-off, detached parents who were possessed of a rather charming naïveté.  They were focused on college football and recreational eating, certainly not giving me any sort of direction in life.  As a scholarship student, I guess I didn’t think in the same practical vein as you.  It’s my fault, yes, but the University could have offered far more support as they do now for FGLI students.  Plus, the Internet as a priceless resource would have been useful for career exploration and worthwhile advice.  C’est la vie.[/quote]

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not. I think perhaps the larlas of the word were a bit better off than I was because I was extremely practical about career choices and had no illusions about the romance of choosing a career with cultural appeal but bad prospects. However, the larla’s certainly had much more fun in their twenties and early thirties than I did (working overnights in the hospital.) [/quote]

DP. Same. Another would-be Larla that would have loved to be an academic, but went into a profession and worked my a** off in my 20’s. Small town, LMC background, on scholarship at a private school surrounded by trust fund kids, moved to the big city. All of it, except it wasn’t hard at all to see that I couldn’t afford the same path as the rich-kid art history majors in my college class. But it’s ok — I had an interesting career and retired early, and now do anything I want. [/quote]

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