I worked this out a little while ago, but I was playing with it on the train. It’s mainly just logical sequencing and a bit of a theory about familial structures that can develop up and out of them. I do have another theory about dominate families, or tribes, and degenerate ones, that feeds into this theory, but that's more of a theoretical structure, this one is pragmatic. One major problem with the pragmatic aspect, are the irrational members of a family, who sabotage other members for bizarre, jealous, selfish &c reasons. – I don’t know how to get around this other than removing them from the family, or from their own lives.
It’s just a theory about stages in a post industrial society, that a young man can go through, to ‘have it all’. The annoying thing is, when I figured it out, I was just that little bit too old to give it a shot.
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15 – 19 Leave school.
Basic Job Skills.
Learn a System of Martial Arts.
Decide on a Trade or Career.
Don’t get anyone pregnant.
Take two years off, before going, or applying for university or starting a trade, if you can. If you have a trade, start it, because it may not be there in two years when you’re ready, and you're better off with a trade, than without one.
If you don’t, perhaps try this.
In this time do three things
a) Get a ‘basics skills job’ – so that means, working in a factory, a warehouse stacking pallets, shoveling concrete somewhere, working retail. Just basic, and enough nights a week to pay for your accommodation, martial arts lessons, and a bit of partying. Also work out what you want as your trade or your career in this period. That’s what this period is for, so you don’t get half way through an accounting degree, straight out of high school, then decide that’s not what you wanted to do with your life after all.
b) Take up a form of martial arts, for at least eight months, at least once a week. Aim for sixteen months, and two nights a week if you can. Do Kick Boxing, Boxing, MMA, ya know, Parkour, or Capoeira if you want something a bit exotic. Do this now, while you’re young, to get it out of your system.
There are two things a young man should learn how to do, (1) to think and (2) how to fight, so no one will tell him what to think, and he'll be able to stand by what he thinks is right.
Do those two things, you’ll walk taller for it.
c) Don’t get anyone pregnant.
19 to 25
Get a trade or career.
Decide what your dream is, and if you really want to follow it.
a) Pick a trade or a career. Pick something that is a specialized skill, and is likely to give you employment over your life time. Be a plumber, a solicitor, a doctor, a carpenter, a teacher, a dentist, a mechanic, a boiler maker, an engineer. Pick something that requires two to six years to complete, and has lots of job opportunities, and is relatively secure. Don’t pick anything high risk like corporate management, trading, stock broking, if you’re first generation, unless you’re really good at it, or you really do want to do it. Look for secure money, or get the secure money first, do the teaching, or accounting degree, then follow the speculative trading as your dream.
b) Sort out, from all the things you’d like, what you might like to most do, if you could do anything. This is your dream. This is what you chase after you get your trade or proffession.
Is it a dirt bike champion, a rock star, an actor, an investigative journalist, a Nobel prize winning scientist, a science fiction writer? It might tie into your career or trade in some way.
25 to 34
Follow your dream, try to make it happen.
But keep in mind, if you’re getting to 32, 34 and nothing, you might need to put away your dream, fall back on your career or trade, so you can start your family, and come back to it, after you’ve had your family.
You might have to chase your dream in your late forties, and early fifties. But at least then, you'll have had a family, and you'll have your resources to go after it, if you still want it. You're not going to get stuck in the middle with nothing to fall back on.
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Notes on hierarchical structures and building dynasties.
Once the first generation has made its mark in a family, a number of members will be successful, a numbers of others, less so, and a number still, will be a dead loss.
Some interesting properties start to emerge.
(1) High risk /big money opportunities become not only feasible, but lose their ‘riskiness’.
Familial money becomes available for high risk ventures, like starting a new business, or investment finance. Big money investments become possible. If all the members of the family, are averaging incomes of between, say, thirty thousand, and a hundred and twenty thousand, then there will be surplus family wealth, where it becomes possible, for a family member coming through who wants to start a new company, or wants to try their hand at a high risk profession, like day trading, to acquire funds, a spare three grand here, five grand there, two grand here, to bring up the fifteen or thirty grand, to have a go at making serious cash, that isn’t available in a first generation hierarchy.
(2) Dukes and Lords.
The family begins to acquire Dukes and Lords. Dukes are like a member of the family who is a mechanic, or a solicitor, or carpenter, who can do work for other members of the family. Lords, are members of the family in a particular field, who, can get other members of that family into said field. Uncle Moe might be a carpenter, who knows someone who’s an electrician they work with, who can get young cousin Curly, into that trade. Recognizing these two infrastructures are an indirect source of wealth, that emerges in second generation hierarchies. It also becomes possible for families to barter with each other, over collective familial resources.
(3) King Makers.
In Medieval Europe, it quickly became necessary, if you were a royal family competing for the Crown, to have an inside man on the clergy, to make sure, when you finally do get in a position for that crown, you’re man will be able to tip the nod, that crowns the king. King Makers are the most powerful units, they’re slightly above Lords, in that they can open the doorway to professions, they literally tip the nods to get make sure such and such gets the crown. – Teachers, administration staff, professors, people with their foot inside the door of education generally, who know what sorts of things go inside of the selective high school tests, the procedures and forms to fill out, the back roads into universities, or the formal requirements of a capstone, and trade certificate registry, talent scouts, publishing, or talent agents, people in charge of rosters, or assignments at a television station, or a modeling agency, or with a foot in the door at a recording studio, these are the King Makers.
The difference between King Makers, and Lords, is King Makers can forward on dreams, while Lords tend to be centered in and around lower professions, and there’s probably a hierarchy to be explored in this.
Bad eggs.
These are family members who are detrimental to the rise of the family. There are any number of reasons for this – I suspect sometimes it’s just birth order, you get a good leaders who are born in the wrong order, or members who sabotage everyone else for bizarre or irrational reasons. I honestly don’t know what to do with these members, but generally, they’re the reason why out of two branches of a family, one will go on to be successful, the other will drop, or be sucked down into the depths of society and stay there. My bet is, it is usually a sabotaging member.