Here are some key key lessons in life, it is important for people to know, and children who understand it early have a huge advantage:
The "money doesn't buy happiness" thing - One of the absolutely most destructive things anyone has ever said. No of course money doesn't buy happiness. But it does buy freedom, and freedom is the essential component to happiness. If you are rich it does not guarantee you will be happy. But if you are not a certain level of financially secure you will not have freedom, and it is almost impossible to be happy without freedom. "Money doesn't buy happiness" implies you shouldn't "care" about money, only about happiness. But it strongly implies that the two are not related which is sickeningly false. I could write a book about this but I will stop now.
"Stay true to yourself" "Be yourself" - etc etc etc, there are many subtle variations. It is 100% true. People deviate from this in many many different kinds of ways, big and small, for many different reasons. But it is 100% true. The cliched example is someone who is an artist but decides to be an accountant, or someone who goes to med school to please their parents, but really is a "painter". The cliched version of this is someone who is an "artist" naturally but makes "square" "boring" "non-artistic" decisions in life, and of course that does happen and still does. But it also happens the other way around - there are natural bankers and accountants who choose to be painters for any of a million reasons. And there are a million other variations of this that don't fall into the "square/artist" dichotomy. But the basic idea is, follow how you are naturally inclined, and don't worry about mimicking other people for any of a million reasons. Even if you are Hitler, my advice to him would be "kill Jews". If you really and truly hate who you naturally are then maybe you should kill yourself. There are a few examples of tricky situations. If you are naturally inclined to do evil, what should you do? For those people it's a different issue, maybe I'll get into later. But for everyone else, just be yourself. If you are a dishonest theif, be a dishonest theif, don't worry about if it's bad. If you are a nerd, be a nerd, don't worry that it's not cool.
Of course many if not most people do do that, and good for them. You know it when you see it. I think Emerson had something similar to say I'm not sure. jjgold is exactly where he should be in life. Brock Landers as well.
Because the point is, if you perfectly follow your natural path in life, you will naturally and easily and effortlessly acquire ALL the things that will make you most likely to be happy - people and friends and women and girlfriends who are most likely to like you, jobs and work situations and life projects you are most likely to do well in, be happy doing, and make money doing. And on and on and on. If you stay on your natural path, all that stuff just comes to you, effortlessly. If you stray from it, it never comes, and you pull at things that are not naturally yours, and worse, new problems arise that you will be far less equipped to deal with than if you had stayed on your path - in which case you probably wouldn't have had those problems in the first place.
Life is not linear, and I can give you a VERY crude but somewhat apt example that illustrates it. Imagine if there was some cute smart guy who never went to the gym, but the kind of guy "intellectual" women like. Now, imagine if that guy went to the Jersey Shore and hung out with Snooki people. Now, they would all hate that guy, and the women would never in a million years like that guy, when, somewhere else, tons of women, maybe way hotter, would like him. And you could look at that guy and say "why don't they like you? You are so much better than they are, they are trash! They should be thankful you are around them!" And the answer is, because human society is not linear. That's why it is crucial to follow your own path. You cannot just take a "lesser" path or a different path and be ok.
Now it's true that most people know that and do it, and that's why most people are roughly happy. And it's also true that you can never follow your own path perfectly, you can never perfectly know what it is, and to the extent that you do know what it is, you can't expect yourself to follow it perfectly. But you also don't have to, as long as you make a roughly honest effort, and don't fuck up any of the big and easy decisions, you'll mostly be fine.
