For real, though, sometimes you can ignore tooth pain and it’ll go away (kinda). I was getting really bad tooth pain when I was in grad school without any sort of meaningful health insurance, so I kept putting off going to the dentist and eventually the pain went away.
Fast forward 5 years when I finally get a job with dental coverage and I go in for a cleaning. They find out that one of my fillings has come loose (on the tooth that had the pain 5 years earlier) and they remove it and start to redrill. All of a sudden the dentist starts swearing and tells me that he “hit a pocket of infected pus and it started spraying out like an oil well,” and it has likely been there since my toothache stopped. Turns out, if you ignore a bad infection long enough, the nerve in the tooth just dies and it doesn’t hurt anymore!
One particularly nasty 5.5-hour root canal later, my teeth are better, but that was an experience I don’t particularly care to repeat.
Life is hard. Painful for a lot of it. But that doesn’t mean don’t live a meaningful life.
I’d argue all the difficulty is what makes anyone’s efforts meaningful. If there were zero strife, what would accomplishment look like?
Philosophers have stated this far better than I can, since the beginning of recorded history in Sumer.
And if it seems things are tough today, read “Hard Times” by Studs Terkel.
(I’ve had chronic, frequently debilitating pain for 30 years. For the last year, just walking/standing has been very difficult. My grandparent’s generation had it even harder - I remember, and understand better now).
The supposition here is that not getting a “good paying job” is about will.
Instead of how it is irl, which is that it’s not up to your will, but a million other things (being a nepobaby), and thus not choosing between these two, but trying them both, at first the left one and at the end of the day the right one.
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