I had a very close friend and several years ago, he had worked his way up to a place uh, at his job where he was making low six figures and he had one or two kids at the time. His wife was a school teacher and his kids were doing the normal dual income thing where they would be in public school all day
. And then they had daycare until the parents got off from work. Now, her being a teacher, she had a little bit more flexibility in her schedule than most full time jobs would as far as having summers off and getting off work at an earlier time. But they were still spending an awful lot of money between
daycare and needing to have a second vehicle insurance for that vehicle, et cetera. And so her net I showed him, I walked through some numbers and I said, you know, your wife is actually only adding an insignificant amount of money to your total post tax income because you're paying tax at a higher tax
bracket on both of your incomes because of hers. And then she obviously has to pay tax on her earnings. And then with those post tax earnings, you have to pay for another vehicle insurance for that vehicle and then take care for your kids in addition to all the econom organization that you're missing
out on. Because when both parents are working, you're gonna spend more money on food. Not just because you can't go shop sales because everything's just a frenetic pace when you're not working, you have so much to catch up on with the home stuff. But also because you're gonna go out to eat more often
and things like that because there's gonna be nights where you're just too tired or you're just eating, then there's the quality of life argument because you're not eating well. No one has time to cook well and you're all stressed out, et cetera, et cetera. Then there's the whole argument of your wife's
a teacher and yet you're sending your kids off to be taught by other people who presumably can't do as good of a job and it's other people. So I don't know, that's like buying milk from the store when you're a dairy farmer. Why on earth would you do that? Get the good stuff at home? Right. Anyway, so
I walked him through this analysis. I said, man, if you guys have one more kid or two more kids, the tax benefits from that. Plus all this other stuff, your quality of life would be something like 100% better than it is. And by the way your wife hates her job. She hates being at home because she feels
guilty that she's not at home more often. She hates being at work because she feels guilty because she's not at home. She got into teaching because she wanted to change the world and I know how that goes. But when you give it all, you've got, you realize that your hands are tied, you can't actually make
the difference that you would like because of the way the system works. I said, why don't you just, why doesn't she just quit her job? Have another kid or two? Get rid of the second car and you'll save so much money or don't get rid of the second car. I know modern, in modern times, people flip out a
little bit about that. So it didn't go well. But the question is, you know, the vast majority of women in the United States who are in a relationship. They don't have nice jobs. They have, they have jobs that earn a mediocre amount of money that are meaningless to them, not in my opinion, but to them
, they don't get up excited to go to work in the morning. They don't Sunday night, they're not excited to restart the week. They work to get money to do the things that they want to do. They don't find meaning in the work that they do and it's really obvious. So why is this held as some kind of a, I
don't know, a source of, of defining value in the life of a modern woman. If, if you're a career woman, high power, you're making six figures, mid to high six figures and you're just, you really enjoy what you do or you just really enjoy what you do and maybe you just make enough to pay your bills on
your own and be independent. Even if you're not independent, you could be financially. But what percent of women fall into those two categories? It's really low. It's really low. So more than half of women are in the situation, I described where they hate their jobs, or at least they only work their
jobs for what the money they make affords and they're not happy with it. So why, why is this held up as some great thing? It's, it's a real, it's a real mystery. And the only, the only answer I can come up with is that there have just been a lot of people that have lied to these ladies and they don't
realize it until they hit their early thirties. More or less. I've seen women get disillusioned in their twenties that happens rather often. But I think for the, for the majority, it, it happens in their early thirties and they say, you know, this isn't all it's cracked up to be. But they feel like if
, if they come out and say that they'll be lambasted by their peers and they will, they will be ridiculed if they come out and say, you know, I don't know what all this hype is about this actually stinks. No one should be excited about some lame job. I mean, if you're not actually making the world a
significantly better place with what you do for work, why would you do that if you didn't have to do it? You know, there's, there's honor in going to work to pay the bills. If that's what you have to do, there's honor in doing that to support other people. But when you're sacrificing more meaningful
things for that, that's not something to be celebrated. That's a really dumb thing to do with your life, especially the prime years of your life. So it would be nice if more people told the truth about this, whether it's in encouraging other uh encouraging young women to avoid that path if they can or
just to tell the truth about your own experience, it's very rare to meet a woman that's content and finds her job, meaningful content at work and finds her job meaningful.