You're right, of course.

But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.

"Just cheer up, depressed person!"

"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"

"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"

"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"

I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.

But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.

I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.

I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.

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thaumasiotes 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> "Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"

I'm not sure lifestyle creep is actually the main problem that celebrities going broke suffer from. Stereotypically the lifestyle is something they can afford, but they make bad investments.

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rootusrootus 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just

I often think this is the biggest word in the English language.

Similar to how I think "might as well" may be the most expensive phrase.

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gizajob 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you expand on that? I feel like it’s the most misused and overused word in my vocabulary and one I wish I could just get rid of a lot of the time and never seem to manage. It just creeps in.

	▲	bryanrasmussen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Just in the usage being complained about argues that whatever it is modifying does not need or benefit from analysis. It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway. Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!! Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't. on edit: changed than to then.