A big thing I struggled with after changing careers was the idea of "doing better."

My entire life had been about scraping by — watching my parents struggle, then struggling myself. Financially, emotionally, day after day.
I had worked my ass off, clawing my way from the very bottom to what I thought was the best I could ever do — and even then, it was barely enough to survive, especially in Denver, Colorado.

Sure, I had a few milestones. I paid off my Forester. I visited China a second time. But like so many Americans, I lived with that gnawing, vibrating pain of debt, like a spiccato cello string stabbing under everything. Debt was just...normal. Expected. A background hum of stress you learned to live with.

And then suddenly: a new role. A new world. A new tax bracket.

🧩 Work That Didn't Feel Like Work

I enjoyed the work — genuinely enjoyed it — and it messed with my head.
It didn't even feel like work most of the time. I got to learn, to solve puzzles — the stuff I loved. How could I be paid more for something that felt easy compared to the soul-crushing jobs I'd done before?

I wasn't emotionally shredded at the end of every day.
I wasn't stuck in endless traffic construction zones for two hours a day.

I was being rewarded — and I didn't know how to accept it.
Why me?

And then, with time: a silence.
The stabbing cello string that had lived under my skin for decades—gone.

🇺🇸 A Real American Pain

For the first time ever, when life threw something at me, I could handle it.

It felt like waking up from a lifetime of sleeping wrong — always with that stiff, seizing pain in your neck and shoulder — and one morning realizing: it's gone.
You move. You breathe. You think, Wow. This is what it's supposed to feel like?!

That was me.
Except the neck pain had been financial.
Life-long.

Once the pain lifted, even a little, I couldn't unsee it.

How is this normal?
How is it that in the richest country in the world, financial pain is the default setting?

Because that's exactly how it's built. And so many of us have felt the pain for a lifetime. Many will never know relief.

🛍️ Debt By Design

Debt is not a bug in the system. Debt IS the system.

We're groomed to crave it: the house, the car, the sunglasses, the newest Xbox.
We are saturated — assaulted — with marketing that makes us want what we don't need. That makes us believe "happiness" comes with a price tag and a payment plan.

The marketing is effective, folks.
It's designed to be.

It keeps the cello strings humming, and stabbing under our skin.

And some of us hear it for what it is.