Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either.
Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?
That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.
It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.
At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.
