Vacations, Jobs That Make Work Seem Like a Vacation, and How to Obtain One of Such Jobs

This vacation is running the risk of ruining me as a future doctor and is causing me to look forward to the vacations I will be able to afford later in my career more than I am looking forward to the actual career itself.  C'est la vie. It's a secret to which I would have been privy eventually, anyway.  The opportunity to take high-end vacations is a reason you should remain in school, study hard, and choose your course of study and future career wisely, kids.  If you can find the perfect but often elusive career that allows you to feel as though you are on vacation much of the time when you are at work and also compensates you well enough that you can take dream vacations at least once every two or three years, don't let the opportunity pass without grabbing it.

The problem for many among us is that we make decisions when we are relatively young which impact our options for the future. While the algebra course you're taking in eighth  or ninth grade (while Common Core pushed algebra up to ninth grade in many places, I think they're still offering it for eighth graders in many schools) may not seem to be of tremendous importance, flunking it and having to repeat it next year reduces the number of math courses you'll be able to complete before college. This, in turn, may impact your admission to the university or program of your choice or the quantity and quality of your scholarship or grant offers, which, ultimately, will impact your post-graduate options. 

While tonight's homework may seem almost optional, if you skip one assignment, you probably will not skip just one assignment. It's incredibly easy for blowing off school work and homework to become a habit.  And while a person may think he or she can slide through middle school and high school without meeting basic expectations but will get his or her academic act together later, all too often it doesn't work out that way. Choices young people make will begin to impact the quality of one's vocational  and/or professional future  sooner than one would like to think.

I'm not suggesting that if someone blows a science test in fourth grade, he or she may as well give up on a dream of becoming an engineer.  Such would be ludicrous.  We're all sufficiently resilient to withstand a few failures in both school and in life, and failure can, if managed well, provide tremendous opportunity for growth.  Furthermore, we all know people who were academic screw-ups until sometime early in high school, and who, for various reasons, chose to change courses and to succeed in school.   If a person hasn't found what works for him or her in terms of navigating the system of school by eleventh grade, however, the odds will have begun to work against that person in terms of future academic and likely professional-status career success. 

If a person is fortunate enough to have greater-than-average mechanical skills, those skills can often be parlayed into decent-paying jobs.  In future years, with the growth of technology, an increasing number of jobs previously performed by humans are going to be done for us by machines, but for now, auto mechanics, welders, and plumbers are still in demand.  Likewise, many students who attended my high school's rival school (in terms of competitive sports; they weren't even close to being academic rivals) were the offspring of California State Department of Corrections employees.  Some of their parents earned six-figure salaries with having completed no education past high school. Most of these people loathed their jobs, but they were paid well enough and had enough time off that they enjoyed a decent lifestyle while not at work. They lived in relatively comfortable homes, drove pricy cars (their kids drove trucks with large tires), and took nice vacations. Most of them dreaded going to work every day that they had to work, but they had the resources to thoroughly enjoy their time off.  Such a job is, in my opinion, far superior to flipping burgers for minimum wage, but still comes with a heavy price to pay in return.

The idea of being able to support oneself at a job  one actually enjoys doing is a relatively modern idea. There may have been some element of choice involved, but I don't think many people in my grandparents' generation had the luxury of choosing work based on personal fulfillment.  A person's job back then, for the most part, was based on skills a person had, what sort of farm or business the family might have owned, possible family connections to training for a particular vocation, or if a family had the means to fund the education of offspring.  I'm not sure if its onset followed  WWII or maybe even the Korean War, but the GI Bill afforded many people to obtain college educations who previously would not have had the means to seek higher education. With an increase in education came and continues to come an increase in options.  

More education is usually better than less education unless a person goes into heavy debt  to obtain a degree that doesn't typically lead to a decent-paying job.   If there's  little to no debt incurred, any degree is better than no degree. 

If a person is going to wind up with in excess of forty-thousand dollars of debt,  it might behoove the person to study something a little more practical than, say, art history.   Unless the holder of the art history degree is unusually lucky, he or she has little chance of finding a job related to an art history degree that pays much more than minimum wage.  My cousin's other grandfather earned a degree in art history, but he waited until he retired after practicing for more than thirty years as an orthopedic surgeon to get the particular degree.  By then it didn't matter that he couldn't find a job related to his degree. He was too old to work, anyway.  One of my uncles who is a banker has a degree in musicology. He got very lucky and found an employer who wanted to hire a college graduate, but the employer didn't particularly care in what field the degree was earned as long as it was a bachelor's degree from at least a moderately reputable institution.  

I had originally planned to remain in this vacation destination for only about ten days. My ten days have come and gone, yet I have no intention of leaving this place anytime soon. The people who manage this hotel say I can extend my stay as long as I want throughout the first three weeks of March.  I need to be back home by the day before the Match Day ceremony on March 16. I can afford the daily rate here for another two weeks. My bodyguard  has left, but I only kept him around because he had already been paid. I don't need that sort of around-the-clock protection.  

If you're in school and doing very well, that's great.  If you're not doing quite so well, you might want to consider increasing your effort. School isn't the only thing in life even when you're young, but if you give it too little priority in your life now,  later in your life you may lose out on the opportunity to take really cool vacations like this one I'm presently enjoying.