"I am not like most people.
My income and job situation and living arrangements DO NOT directly effect my happiness and contentedness with my life. I can work a minimum wage job and be happy. NOBODY seems to get this. I don't have to make a certain amount of money to be happy. There is more important things in life than feeling good..."

I get it. I ditched a lucrative sales job to be a full-time dad. It was easy to earn money. but The more I made, the less comfortable I was. I was actually selling a product that educated people too, I just hated the ratrace and felt annoyed that I was relying on an institution for income. People look at your salary as the only mark of accomplishment, but any putz that can speak the language and is willing to lick a little ass can earn a decent income.

So I let my wife worry about flow; I'm going to study botany and literature cuz those're interesting and I'm not aiming it at a career. I do intend to measure my success by the net amount of positive vibes I can contribute to the world, probably ecological protection.

I have a friend who also doesn't consider money very important, but he's 25 and been going from fastfood job to fastfood job, and he's content not making much and feels more enlightened and moral than most because of it. I want to tell him that feeling would be more justified if he was still ambitious in some nonprofit sense, like a collective cause.

He still lets money define him; he's just anti-money. Too many people use the flaws of capitalism as an excuse to not work hard in areas that really matter, or areas that are personally valuable. We can't allow a polarizing effect when we look at avaricious corporate monkeys, meaning we don't have to be drifting hippies in order to protest. We can still work hard and stick it to them cause we're not in it for $$. I hope you feel what I'm spraying there.

Your mom sounds just like mine. When the cops brought me home when I was 17 after getting caught puffing, my mom insisted that my older sister follow me to my classes throughout the next day, which she found absurd and ignored. It's an exercise in absolute futility to use reason to get many of the older generations to see weed as it is, even the ones who've smoked it. There was so much taboo and danger in doing it that they believed, just like everyone else, that it was an evil drug.