Jesus Christ, are you my mirror image!? Seriously. I'm so sick of people whining about how I'm "so lucky" to have my job. To hear these people talk about how

Jesus Christ, are you my mirror image!? Seriously. I'm so sick of people whining about how I'm "so lucky" to have my job. To hear these people talk about how lucky I am is a huge fucking insult because they act is if it just fell in my lap. It didn't. I worked my ass off for it, seemingly just like you did. I worked shitty part-time jobs to pay for my own college education. I worked one summer AS A VOLUNTEER (i.e. unpaid) in order to get noticed and it worked, too, because at the end of that summer the company offered me my first decent-paying job in the tech industry (well, it was only $10-something/hr, but it sure beat $5.25 that I was making before). All this time I was working on contributing to Free Software projects - not just in the hopes of getting noticed, but in order to improve my skills. After several years of this, I got noticed and got an internship at a start-up and I grabbed that opportunity and I've become very successful because of it. Saying this was all "luck" is bullshit. I made my own luck. I worked my ass off for everything I got. I had friends in college that came from much wealthier families than I came from (my family isn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) who had plenty of opportunities in their lives but didn't act on them. Where are they now? Probably at those protests whining that they didn't get a job handed to them just for being them. I'm serious. Someone I knew in college (studying anthropology iirc) was offered, through a friend, a job interview at the Smithsonian. He didn't take it. Why? Because it wasn't a "sure thing". He was upset that he'd actually have to (heaven forbid) interview. Where's he now? Living with his parents because he hasn't been able to get a job in the past 8 years. He had better opportunities than I did, but I made more out of mine than he did. He's one of the people who tell me how "lucky" I am that I have such a good job. Makes me sick.