What are you talking about? No one is stopping you from working hard, earning a decent living, not using credit to buy things, and doing a job valued by society.

My daughter is a Covid ICU nurse and her husband works for Apple. Nothing remotely related to complex financial engineering. They have a nice home and good lives. They paid off their college debt by living with my son in law's grandparents for a few years and then bought a house.

Most people actually do want to live in world with complex financial mechanisms. Because without them, my daughter and her husband would have had to save for another ten years to buy their house... instead they could get a mortgage at a very low rate because some financial genious figured out how to securitize mortgages.

They bought a new car recently thanks to another financial genius he figured out how to secutirze car loans.

They are saving for retirement through their company IRA plans because some other finanical genius figured out how to package securities in mutual funds and to fractionalize them so they could be added to company 401K accounts.

You don't have to be a financial wizard to enjoy what other financial wizards have created. Both my daughter and her husband love their iPhones, PCs, iWatches, etc., which were all made possible because some corporate debt financial wizard helped to figure how Apple could fund the construction of plants to build their devices.

They come home at night when they are tired to watch Netflix (another company which exists because some financial wizard invented the capital markets).

You are responding to me because other financial wizards figured out how to raise the money to build out the infrastructure backbone on which your internet runs.

I don't think I am better than someone because it is not their desire to be wealthy or engage in the complex financial capital markets on which our society depends.

I bailed on getting wealthier when at 48 I had serious heart issues and decided I had enough to be happy. I worked hard when I was young usually more than 70 hours a week, but I would not ask anyone to do the same unless it was their choice... but my response was to the idea that dying "in debt" is a bad thing.

My point was not that I will die a billionaire, I won't but rather debt is a tool that can be used to help accumulate wealth for an individual but also benefit society. I have several properties I rent to lower income families... we earn less than 5% on our investments but without capital markets we would earn nothing and three families would not have homes.

You want a "simple society"... there are plenty of simple societies in third world countries... my youngest daughter is heading off to college to become a humanitarian engineer and wants to work in the Peace Corp helping people in simple societies... I support her doing those things that makes her happy... get a head start on her... start today.

The point of my response was simple... advanced economies are built on very complex capital structures. Do you own a credit card? It is a powerful tool and like any tool it can be used to get you ahead or get in you in debt over your head.

The headline I was respoinding to was "The Majority of Americans Die in Debt. What the?".

My point it is a dumb idea to think debt is bad... spending money unwisely is bad. Consuming far more than you earn will end with you being in a seirous financial hole. But wisely using a debt to buy a house to live in... buy a car to drive to work in... to fund the development of skills... or even leverage investments is not dumb.

My daughter and son in law do not have to be financial geniuses to borrow money for a house or a car. But somewhere a financial genious made it possible for them to borrow that money. You say you don't want to live in society where young people can buy homes by borrowing... fine live with your parents... save up a pay cash... that is perfectly okay...

As an aside, I don't look down on anyone. In my youth I worked flipping burgers, picking up garbage, cleaning toilets, as a psychiatric aide in a mental health facility, and many other good but low paying jobs... there is never anything wrong with doing something worth doing...

My favorite saying regarding work is if you don't think picking up garbage is an important job... have the garbage man not show up for a few weeks...

I do resent and find it offensive that you think those of us who work to make our society work behind the scenes for all those things you espouse that simple people do are part of the problem rather than part of the solution... like I said, if you want to go work in a third world country without our societies complex capital structure that holds it together... I am not stopping you... but don't disparage important jobs that you don't understand.