Great story. Sure, it’s something to think about. But those stories also come from people with little or no financial wealth. These kinds of stories inherently shame ambitious people. I don’t mean that @tommor is doing that. But I used to really appreciate these kinds of stories. Not anymore, though.
When you hear this story it makes you think there’s more to life than financial goals, it’s not necessary to be so ambitious, blah blah blah.
What’s missing from the story is that it doesn’t tell you about how he’s one bad day away from catching no fish and having no food. His lifestyle has no room for margin of error. He’s living day to day. If his roof starts leaking, he now has an emergency and he has no money to fix it. If his wife gets sick, his only option is to go to the local hospital. He has cheap (if any) insurance. So, he has to wait 3 months for an appointment with a specialist. Meanwhile his wife is in pain.
He didn’t get any extra fish yesterday, and the water is too rough today, so tomorrow he’s got no food. His kids live the same way he does, so they have no extra resources besides the local people they know.
Their car is old and breaks down often. The eldest son’s wisdom teeth are coming in and he’s in pain. He’s scared to go to the dentist because the local dentist is really cheap on the novacaine.
They’ve never been out of the country, and never will be. They like to think themselves as patriotic, but that’s not the real reason.
The children graduated high school, but never attended university. Not much different from the grandfather who never went to school, and who also just liked to watch the waves instead of catching more fish. Who by the way is in hospice care with a nurse one day a week for 4 hours because the family can’t afford more time, so the family helps. Which is nice.
They all are rather pleasant people, but they have limited views, and have little ambition in life. They are accustomed to a life of living month-to-month and struggling to pay taxes on their homes. They hate going to the doctor because they can only afford the bad ones. Their only choice is to appreciate what they have because they have so little. Their solutions are always just temporary fixes because true solutions cost too much. Their life is one crisis after another. Forever.
iits only like a parable really to get a point/philosophy across
But most of us can’t really feel success unless we are backed by a sense of security in the first place.
One needs to be born with lots of luck to live a happy life with the fisherman theory. But for most of us our plans fail quite often, and in the absence of plan B, your chances of survival are slim.