"'I thought it was super cool. I had no concept of what $1,800 gets you.' His mother could sense his financial naivete: 'I think he thought it was going to set him up for life,' Lorna said.... And, as he got older and wiser, $1,800 started to seem like a smaller and smaller amount. While working at a local Dairy Queen, 'my first paycheck was just under that [amount], and I was like "Oh,"' Sivert said with a laugh...."
From "His mother offered him $1,800 to stay off social media for six years. He just cashed the check" (WaPo).
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The real answer isn't in the list, Althouse. He learned how to scam his mother.
After 1 year of Joe Biden and Democrat regimes 1800$ isn't worth as much as when he made the original agreement.
The car he wanted went up on average about 20% this year.
True story: My father offered my sister $100 (a long time ago) to eat a single dried kalamata olive. These are black, wrinkly, oily, and smelly olives...but just olives and fully safe. He made the same offer on a several occasions.
My sister declined each time.
I learned that youth is wasted on the young, and that you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink. There are some raw deals in life, but there's also a lot of misguided stubbornness. The $1,800 may have been worth it to the guy involved, but he's surely a better person for avoiding social media even if paid $1 or $0.01.
I checked you can get along without social media, but the most valuable lesson is learning the value of money. He got that from getting a job, but I don't see who that's a lesson of this story.
I have told both my daughters (17 and 12) that if they reach the age of 25 without a tattoo, I'll give them $5,000.
Just enough money to give them second thoughts when they are surrounded by drunk friends, "I'd do it with you Becca but it's going to cost me 5 grand!"
If it doesn't work, it doesn't cost me anything. If it does work, it's money well spent.
With Biden inflation though, it might not be enough, anymore...
While working at a local Dairy Queen, 'my first paycheck was just under that [amount]
tell us more, about this Dairy Queen that pays $900 a week?
Let's assume he worked full time $1,800/80= $22.5/hr
of course, he DIDN'T say he made that, he said it was 'just under'.. So, $22/hr?
That was money... For Last year
As Yancey Ward said...
The real answer isn't in the list, Althouse. He learned how to scam his mother.
It's NOT AS IF, he REALLY stayed off social media.
That's like paying your daughter not to mail nude selfies; the kid gets the money, and keeps on posting
My father offered me $5 for every Dickens novel I read. I didn't take him up on it.
His childhood pleasures were not mine, apparently.
True story: My father offered my sister $100 (a long time ago) to eat a single dried kalamata olive. These are black, wrinkly, oily, and smelly olives...but just olives and fully safe. He made the same offer on a several occasions.
My sister declined each time.
My Mom makes fresh ground horseradish for Passover. Wonderful, strong, sinus clearing stuff. I would always offer the kids $5 dollars to have a dollop on some Matzah and of course they would refuse. That is until they got older and started to get a taste for sushi and realized most Wasabi is just green horseradish.
"The real answer isn't in the list, Althouse. He learned how to scam his mother."
What's your evidence of that?
Are you saying that he went on social media secretly? There wouldn't be a WaPo article about this if it were known that he had, so I don't like accusing a real person of cheating.
But maybe you mean something else. But what? His mother openly admits that she would have paid more and that she took advantage of his naiveté, so where has he scammed his mother or learned how to scam her in the future?
I think he learned that she pretty much scammed him.
He learned there isn't always enough value in delayed gratification to make it a good bargain.
"A nickel... I open my own hotel!"
He earned less than $1 a day to give up social media, and with $1800 in hand, he's thinking of buying a damned chair!
Clever idea on her part. Even a "failure" where he was only off social media for three years would be a victory.
A lot of parenting is outwitting your children. Your ability to do this increases every year, but their ability to think back increases even more. If you are still 50-50 at age ten, you are winning.
He learned that working for a single pay period at Dairy Queen made as much money as limiting his communication with friends for 6 years.
It didn't say he wasn't allowed to text, so he would still have been able to communicate with friends. He just didn't spend his teen years mugging for "likes."
LOL! Let me poll the commentariat- how many of you think the boy really didn't use social media for those 6 years? The story is either completely fabricated by boy and mother, or the boy used social media without his mother's knowing it. The option where he actually fulfilled the terms of the contract is ridiculous on its face.
To anyone who believes this teenager went six years without ever going on social media, I've got some swampland in Florida...
I find this especially amusing:
"There wouldn't be a WaPo article about this if it were known that he had..."
What world are you living in? Who thinks the writers of the article even bothered to investigate the claims by the boy and his mother? They don't bother to check facts on all the important stories of the last decade they got laughably wrong.
I think he learned that she pretty much scammed him.
Did she? It was worth $1800 for her. It was worth $1800 for him (at the time). Now he realizes it wasn't as much money as he thought. But there's no discussion of if he would have done it for say $18,000 (if that amount could even have been arranged for by his mother).
To put it in a hypothetical, if Donald Trump gives Barron Trump a million dollars to stay off social media is Donald scamming him, or is Barron scamming Donald?
$1800 was enough incentive for him to respond to the societal pressure (especially I'm sure among his peers) to stay off social media.
It gave him an out. "Sorry, I'd like to go on social media, but I'll lose out on $1800".
How would you have voted on your poll Ann?
Althouse said, in regards to sons lying to their mothers...
What's your evidence of that?
Are you saying that he went on social media secretly?
This may (apparently, WILL!) come as a Shock to you; but sons REGULARLY LIE to their mothers.
Jeeze! do you realize, my mother STILL doesn't know how many times i've been in jail?
even though she paid for some of the bails?
Ann Althouse said...He learned that working for a single pay period at Dairy Queen made as much money as limiting his communication with friends for 6 years.
All true, but getting a job at Dairy Queen had nothing to do with the deal he made with his mom. It's just something he did at some point.
My high school class has what I would call and "interenet presence" - it's not really a blog site - where the members receive infrequent emails from each other.
Does that qualify as "social media"?
LOL! Let me poll the commentariat
I'll bite.
The option where he actually fulfilled the terms of the contract is ridiculous on its face.
It's possible he never went on social media, but I agree very unlikely. That being said, does it matter? He didn't have a social media presence enough for it to be a blatant lie (otherwise she wouldn't have paid).
What was the mothers intentions for the contract? It was to minimize social media's impact on her son's life. She achieved that, no? Even with possible deception on his part.
If he learned that being paid to do something pays better than being paid not to do something, I would say that is a very valuable life lesson.
He's better off, so it would have been worth it to go without for $0. But he got $1,800. Win!
The most important lesson learned is that you can get along without social media. While it's vital to learn that you can make your own choices when you earn your own money, that's a lesson that is learned by everyone by the time they reach adulthood (even if they still decide not to work). Whereas almost no one younger than baby-boomers seems to know that they can get along just fine without social media.
I think that most of the commenters are getting mixed-up by the question:
"What did the boy learn? Check the most important lesson."
I think this means, what does the boy think about the deal right now? This is the boy's subjective feeling about the lesson. Not, what will the boy think of the deal many years from now, when he's older and wiser? Or even, what do random, older and wiser people think of the deal?
Clearly, from his statement about earnings from Dairy Queen, he thinks he got scammed by his mom.
I once inherited a large-ish amount of money, not Rockefeller sized, but a bundle for someone of my modest means. I thought:Yay--now I can drop out of Corporate Hell and devote myself to writing. Then I got downsized out of my day job and had to live on my inheritance. You'd be surprised how fast it gets used up when you have to live in it, especially when the city is transitioning from one that prided itself on its modest rents into what a friend of mine called "Yuppie Disneyland."
'While working at a local Dairy Queen, 'my first paycheck was just under that...'
Did they only pay him once a month : )
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