For what it's worth, I'm pushing 40 and have a house and kid, and I wrote the comment you're replying to.

I don't consider losing my job to be traumatic in any way. It's nearly impossible to find good developers, so if you have a bit of skill you don't ever need to worry about the consequences of being unemployed.

Now we are talking!

We have zeroed down to what prevents people from taking risks or being happy or being content. Its about slowly walking in debt traps which never go away all your life.

As a kid you are fearless, because somebody else takes care of your finances, you feel no pressure, stay happy and do what you want. Once you grow up, in your teens you take inputs from things around you and try to be like the richest. What you don't realize is that such a life 'loaned' not 'owned'. The day you go to work, you spend your salary like no spend thrift did before.

You change your iPhone every year, because everybody else is doing so. You buy everything from credit from clothes to toilet paper to car. Sometime later a colleague purchases a home and due to peer pressure you just trap yourself into a 20-25 year load on back breaking interest. You pay taxes on property and everything you own.

By the time you are done with all this you are too old to even enjoy what you have. Meanwhile you spend away your whole thinking of clearing the loans, trapping your self in never ending fear 'What will happen if I don't' clear the loan/ or if I loose the job.

This greatly reduces your ability to flexible and agile in terms of taking risks. This also kills your pursuit of happiness, because all the while you are worried of doing something out of compulsion regardless whether you like it or not.

The thing important here is to fix a upper limit and have some attitude for gratitude. A heck lot of people work a day of manual labor and go home with happiness filled in their hearts. While we worry about not having some X gadget which some colleague has. We complain about vacations et al.

Not tying happiness with money can help you get a lot of things in life with little stress.

>I agree in principle, but it's not always so simple. When you're young, have no kids, no mortgage, no car loan, etc, it's pretty easy to just say "fuck off, see ya" when your employer acts abusively.

Even if you have all those responsibilities and you're leveraged up to your eyeballs you can still quit your job. You just need to line up another one first. I've been doing technical work for almost 25. In that time I've quit two jobs because they weren't treating me the way I expect to be treated, but I've never been without a job.

Even if you can afford it you're really hurting yourself by screaming "fuck off, see ya" at your boss and stomping out to look for another job. It's a lot easier to find a job when you already have one, and your negotiating position for salary and benefits is much stronger.

I'm 32 with 3 kids and a wife, and I literally walked out of a fortune 500 company that is looked at as one of the best places to work. I have no problem telling someone to "fuck off, see ya" if I feel like I am getting mistreated.