Farming is arguably more complicated and requires more domain knowledge than most service jobs today.

I don't even know if this is arguable. Most service jobs likely could be trained within a week at most. The most complicated part generally involves learning how to operate a point of sale system. Most of them could be operated by anyone, which is why self checkouts are a thing now.

Farming on the other hand, especially modern farming, must take a lot longer to learn. There is a lot more to learn about your equipment alone, nevermind your crops, fertilizers, rotating fields, weather patterns, etc.

Most farmers in wealthy countries today have Ag Ec degrees and are spreadsheet jockeys, whether they want to be (many do) or not.

My point was that there was no choice but to break your back to pay the Dime tax to your local church, but ofc I couldn't farm a potato if my life depended on it.

Do you still miss the time where we were all farmers ?

He seemed like a genuinely nice dude who came from humble background who tried to improve his life situation but failed to do so, but at the same time you're right there could be something I'm missing from only having a ~20 minute chat with him.

I agree that we're trending up which should feel AMAZING, but we're human so people's individual stories are what make us feel the most ;)

Also at my high school the metric for our school's success was 99%+ of the graduating class going to college, and it felt like pure vanity because it meant more likely than not tons of people going into debt and getting nothing out of it for the sake of "education"

Well I can give me my case then, I was raised in Normandy by a familly of small shop owners, went to the local college paid by taxes and now work in an investment bank in Hong Kong.

I feel the problem is not that college is useless even if massively used, but maybe the american pricing of education is not aligned with expected returns, as you pointed out. It's far from mandatory in the countries I know to take a big loan for studies. Usually it's even more everyone else struggling to pay taxes for you to go.

Agreed! This dilemma could be solved if college was much cheaper. Another commenter mentioned his annual tuition in Italy was about 2k euros which is unheard of here in the states... It's hard to have a negative ROI at that point.

> The story that hit me the hardest was when I was chatting with an Uber driver

This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”