I would happily make a career switch if I had the feeling my work in a school would be useful and doable. Where I live, I tried it and it was neither of the two. After having experienced efficient companies, schools feel mind-boggingly stupid. And the policy of never failing students and reluctantly enforcing rules generates an serious waste of human energy.
Seeing the number of poor people in the world, I don't understand what makes you believe you couldn't be one of them. Their kids also need to eat, learn and grow.
I watched a friend generate a 10 pages report based on multiple documents, including scientific papers, and it was almost flawless. It would have taken me days.
A milder version of it was Copilot setting up an environment for a Jupyter notebook. What would have been annoying back and forth between googling and docs went like a breeze.
You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.
The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.
Yes, the hardest problem for me is the social aspect of opting out of consumerism. It makes most people feel really uncomfortable, like being sober in a group of social alcoholics. Clothes don’t look cool enough. Local vacations are seen as boring. Not going to restaurants is perceived as a lack of social aptitude.
Another problem is housing and living environment. Although it is very much possible to live in a smaller space, nice neighborhoods (quiet, clean, green) are expensive.
But basic necessities are almost free in rich societies, if you have time.
There's something visually appealing about full-height windows, but they're not worth it in the long run. You get used to them fast, they're less energy efficient, they're more expensive. If they aren't fixed, the lower part being closer to the ground is more prone to water ingress. I woudn't say they don't make sense at all, but large continuous windows that aren't full height provide almost all the benefits in daily use, with many advantages.
It’s good and cheap, but don’t talk about politics to it or it might trigger some sort of censorship rule. You can see it think, then suddenly erase everything and suggest to switch to another subject, without explaining anything. I also had it output some sort of generic message about how the news outlets are in the service of the people. Both times I was surprised because I didn’t make any sensitive requests, neither illegal nor subversive. But it was a remotely political topic and it was enough. There was something both chilling and refreshing about it, since censorship in the west is usually more subtle.