Stop Comparing Your Life With Others in Hawaii (because it's not fair)

so sometimes in Hawaii it seems like everyone else is spending a lot of money and living it up like they're buying new things maybe taking a new trip maybe a new truck or a new Tesla and you look at your life and you wonder why isn't my life like that then you think about the cost of living here in Hawaii and how it's so high and then those thoughts of maybe I should leave Hawaii start to creep in but what you might not think about are some of the advantages that certain people have here in Hawaii and that's what I want to talk about in this video and when we talk about not keeping up with the Joneses or the tanas or the Kims it's a lot easier said than done especially now that we have social media [Music] hwai now speaking of advantages there was this one time when I was in elementary school and we had to do a book diarama and if you're not familiar with that it's where you have to take a shoe box and after reading a book you have to create a scene in The Shoe Box out of paper and arts and crafts things now for this project I distinctly remember I picked Charlotte's Web if you're not familiar with that story it's about a pig who gets saved by a very creative Spider by writing things in the web I had envisioned as a fourth grader that I wanted to have a spiders web with writing on it clearly out of the league of an Ordinary Elementary School kid and so I remember the night before there I am struggling to put this together and I think my dad saw and he probably felt sorry for me so he told me you know what son don't worry about it just leave it I'll work on it tonight and it'll be ready by tomorrow so the next day I wake up and there it is on the kitchen table this shoe box with this spider and this very beautiful spider web made out of string which you'd think wouldn't be that difficult to do but if you've actually tried to make a spiders web out of string in a shoe box it's actually quite difficult to do so I turned it in that day brought it to school and all my classmates saw it my teacher was so impressed of course I got an A I think it was clearly the best diarama in the class I remember when the teacher asked me did you do this and I said yes of course that was a lie and in that sense I had somewhat of an advantage not just a dad who could help me but a dad who had the technical skills to do crafts and was able to figure out how to engineer a spider's web out of string now I mentioned that little kids project because you never know what people's advantages are maybe unfair Advantage but we'll talk about that later but you you never know what people's advantages are could be their grandparents money it could be their parents money it could be the reason why they're able to buy that new house or that new car or send their kid to private school because what you're seeing online is not the entire picture now I know that we know that but still after seeing highlight re after highlight re if you're caught in a very bad mental state space it could just seem like everyone else is doing doing all these things and again you start to wonder why your life isn't like that now I'm not suggesting that everyone should disclose their financial situation or how much in debt they are that's not what I'm suggesting that is their own business and people don't need to know that but I think if you think about it in those types of terms maybe you won't be so hard on yourself or at least it brings a broader perspective on a situation that you may see as unfair and I think especially in this day and age we need to be very careful when we start comparing ourselves especially in a small place like Hawaii cuz I know families that have bought into very affluent areas here on aahu and they drive a nice car and maybe send their kids to private school and you think oh my gosh they must be so rich and so well off but then later on you learn well their parents help them buy the home or the grandparents of their children are helping to pay for their private school $20,000 tuition and then things kind of get a little bit clearer I guess on the situation and I think this illustrates that life is not fair and the more that we try to make it fair I I think it just kind of goes against just how life happens to be and there are times when even I struggle to not compare my life to other people especially if I'm having a very bad week like the last few weeks got sick had some things going on it's hard not to compare yourself to what other people are going through especially a lot of their successes because when I hear a colleague or a friend who buys a place I'm happy for them but then there's also a part of me sometimes that just I don't know it it's like an envy that starts to grow like kind of like one of these weeds over here it it grows off very very small small and then if I don't catch it and I don't tend to it starts to grow bigger and bigger and bigger because then I think to myself yeah good for them but what is wrong with me and if I don't catch myself I start to become very envious and it's not really a great place to be so in those moments rather than become extremely jealous I have to remind myself of all of the advantages that I had here in Hawaii and I know this is a very slippery slope if you attribute success for other people too much to these advantages it starts to not give them any credit for what they actually contributed but I I think if you focus more so on the advantages that you had in your life and you recognize those things well maybe there's some gratefulness and appreciation that you can have oh there's the cannon he sealed it up though so here are some of the unfair advantages that I recognize that I had in my life the first is I grew up with two parents in a house and I didn't realize how important that was until now years later when I'm starting my own family how difficult that is to actually maintain a loving family and also to be able to grow up in a house with two incomes and with that I was able to play golf growing up which is a relatively expensive sport if you've ever played it as well as attend private school for K through 5th grade which I feel like really propelled my learning when I eventually went to public public school I was able to go to college away from Hawaii and in order to do that and pay for that my parents took out loans for themselves now eventually I paid them back and I paid off all my student loans but still just having parents who could borrow money really helped me with my education on top of that they bought my car on the mainland and by the way that's the car that I'm still driving nearly 20 years later never had a car payment as well as paid for my flights two and from Hawaii for every Christmas and summer vacation and of course probably the biggest financial help that they gave me was they gifted me some money when I went to go and buy my place here in downtown and I paid them back for most of it but there's still some that's lingering but I do want to acknowledge that without that help I would not have been able to buy my place even though it was affordable affordable without that help I would not have been able to get it and when I think back to all of these things yes I put in the hard work I showed up I worked hard to get a lot of what I have but I also recognized that without my parents' help without certain advantages in my life my life would have either been a whole lot harder or I just would not have access to all of these opportunities and I really try my best not to forget that I think it's a reason why when it comes to social media if you follow me on Instagram I don't really have much to show off of I don't feel like I have a lot to show off but also I'd feel kind of weird if I'm showing off this lifestyle that really isn't mine and it's also a lifestyle that I didn't quite get on my own I don't feel like I deserve that type of Lifestyle if I were to portray something that was lavish or wild or even exciting this is just my life I got here with the help of my parents with a lot of the hard work that I put in with a lot of I would say luck and I don't feel like I need to show that off I guess it's probably why I don't have a lot of followers on Instagram but uh that's fine morning now we're talking about wealth primarily being passed on from generation to generation I think often times we don't think about the future and future Generations because we're so focused on today and that's totally natural to think about just today but I I have thinking about this when it comes to passing on wealth like we do in Hawaii whether it's Financial cash or liquid assets or whether it's property or homes which is often times the only way that a lot of local people can afford a place and I think about how I don't think that wealth is going to transfer so well or so nicely from my generation to my kids' generation now I think there's a lot of old money in Hawaii and maybe this doesn't apply to them but I think there's going to be some sort of bottleneck coming up in the future where wealth could be transferred from my grandparents to my parents fairly easily because a lot of the people were able to buy homes because it was a lot more affordable it wasn't affordable for everyone but it was a lot more affordable but now that the wealth is being passed from my parents generation to myself because things are so expensive we're kind of using up all the money and so when it comes to passing wealth from myself my generation to my kids' generation with inflation and just the extreme cost of living I just don't think there'll be much left or if anything does get passed on to them other than the house it's not going to have the same impact it won't be that influential I mean sure we'd be able to help them out here and there but it's just going to be completely different and so where does that leave us right now well I hope three things the first is I hope that people can recognize the advantages or good fortune that they've had in their own life really more of a heart of gratitude whether it could be financial resources that you had access to good relationships job opportunities or just plain luck I hope people can recognize that that does play a factor into their life and because of that maybe tone it down a little bit on the show boating maybe a little more humility the second thing is to make sure that we check ourselves when we start comparing our life to other people because we don't know their entire story we don't know how much help they're getting we don't know how much debt they're carrying we don't know their situation and so what we see on the outside may not be what is actually going on and that just helps to put things into perspective when we feel like why isn't my life like that and the third and I think probably most important thing is thinking about the future like thinking about our kids and how will this transfer of wealth work with the Next Generation if there's even that much of a generation left so let me know what you think in the comments below thanks for watching and Aloha hello hell hello hello hello hello from I

Channel: Hello From Hawaii

Views: 12,637

Keywords: living in hawaii, Life in hawaii, what is it like in Hawaii, Moving to hawaii, hello from hawaii, hawaii, oahu, honolulu, hawaii life, life on hawaii, hawaiian life

Id: Qs5g6sUS2uM

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2024