Why Don't You Get A Job?

“Get a job” is the best, if not most practical advice, I have ever received. Sure it may sound harsh, but to me, it makes perfect sense. One day when I came home from school, I learned that my mom had gotten the new car she had been talking about getting. Naturally, I was quite excited even though I do not enjoy driving and the car is for her, not me. However, I was not as happy when I remembered that our insurance rates also went up because we had gotten a new car and because my brother and I were new drivers. My mom had told us that we would have to start contributing $50 a month to help cover the increase. With my flawed sense of the value of money, I thought it would be easy to do this. After all, I thought, video games cost about $50 and I have plenty of those, so there would be no problem. I later realized several flaws in my plan. First, before this, my average weekly income was somewhere around 5 dollars. This means that each month, I would lose $25-30 paying for the insurance. Second, I did not get a new video game every month with the money that I had earned during that month. It takes a while to earn the money to buy video games, especially on $5 a week. Third, I would not have enough money to cover both the rise in insurance rates and video games, which could lead to some hard decisions. Then, my mom gave told me something that I will never forget. She told me that I should get a job. Besides work in the summer on my grandma’s farm, I had never had a paying job before. I thought about it was very excited. I could hardly imagine what I could do with all of the money I would earn from my new job. Actually, I could imagine it, and it involved paying for insurance and video games. After applying to several stores that I wanted to work at like Gamestop and Borders, my mom persuaded me to apply to other places, like Christmas Tree Shop and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. After searching unsuccessfully for a while, my mom volunteered me to mow the lawn of someone from our church. At first, I objected, but after remembering my predicament, I hesitantly agreed. Having mown that lawn, and another one that I was also volunteered for, weekly for a few months, I can easily say that it is good to have a job, because while working, I learned that there is never anything wrong with having more money.

Mean Everything to Nothing

There is no concrete way to tell whether or not a life has meaning or value. These can only be decided about yourself when looking back on your life. No one else can determine whether or not a life was worth living because everyone has different morals and beliefs. This is why the death panel debate is terrible: a random group of people has no idea whether or not another person’s life has meaning. I think that people can only decide whether or not their own life has meaning, and it does not have to be done from their deathbed. Every day, we need to just think if we like how our life is going and if we think our life has been worth it. This way, we can make whatever small changes we want to make on a daily basis instead of having a huge meltdown later in life when we decide that we want to take our life in a completely new direction. There is no concrete purpose in life. Life is whatever we make of it.

At the end of my life, there are several things I would like to have. First of all, I would like to have a great family, a loving wife, and possibly some awesome kids. It would be great to be able to look back at my life and see people who loved me. Humanity in general would benefit if everyone was loved. Next, I would want to be able to look back on my life and see that I had accomplished something. It wouldn’t have to be something big like curing cancer, I would just want to have done something that mattered to someone. If more people just decided to help people, the world would be a much better place. I would also want to have long life, but not too long. I would want to live longer than 100 years, because that feels like it would end too quickly, but I would not want to live forever. Most people feel like their life is too short, and it would be nice choose how long you live. Most people feel like they would benefit from just a few more months or days or even hours. More time on Earth would also help because longer life means more time to help the homeless, do research, and so on. I would want something to be named after me to help people remember me. It could be a park or a bench or something, but I would want the people that I cared about to be able to remember me after I die. This is something that everyone struggles with. Everyone wonders if they will be remembered after they die or if their life has meaning. If people could know that they would be remembered by others, many people would die happy. Finally, I would want to be perfectly healthy and sane when I die. I imagine that there would be nothing worse than watching someone you care about suffer from something like Alzheimer’s, and I can imagine that it would be terrible to have to suffer from a disease like that. It is very hard to lose someone to cancer or any other disease, and I would not want to put my loved ones through that.