Right, this gets philosophical pretty quickly, but I think your personal takeaway from childhood is bad. I think there are more important things in life than meeting the arbitrary expectations of society. And I think a better lesson to take away from childhood is that hard work is valuable and important.

I think that for me (and I suspect for you as well though I wouldn't presume to say for sure), while my outcomes have been good without having internalized a high value for hard work, it could have only been better if I had. It's true that I can get quite far on the power of privilege and intellect alone, but I'm convinced I would get much farther still with a better work ethic. And that's what I'd prefer for my children.

> while my outcomes have been good without having internalized a high value for hard work, it could have only been better if I had

That's fair. For me personally, I feel that even better outcomes are meaningless when my outcomes have been more than good enough already. I wouldn't disparage hard work in the right contexts, but would you say hard work is still valuable and important even when the results of said hard work are not valuable or important?

Yes that's why it gets philosophical, I do think hard work is valuable even if the outcome of that work isn't. I think this is more true of younger people, because building a hard work habit, even through lower value work, is likely to lead to hard work with high value results later in life.

Certainly, it is a philosophical issue at this point, and we could agree to disagree here. But I would note that

> I do think hard work is valuable ... because building a hard work habit ... is likely to lead to hard work with high value results later in life.

It sounds like you still value hard work because it increases the expectation value of future outcomes, and not entirely “just because” you value hard work. And so, maybe we agree somewhat on the philosophical level too, after all :)

Your first ellipsis spans a sentence-ending period, which distorts my meaning. The first sentence stands alone, while the second sentence introduces an additive point. I think hard work is valuable both intrinsically (the point being made in the first sentence), and in service to future outcomes (the point being made in the second sentence). If in other comments I made it seem like I think it is only intrinsically valuable, that was a lack of clarity.