A useful skill is more valuable than gold.

I have a friend that is sixty or seventy years younger than am I. He is trying to decide how to live his life and he thinks that I might have some useful suggestions. He does not understand that I am not smart enough to do that. I can only tell him war stories about my own life that was lived in a world entirely different from the one that we are in now. The effort is made even more difficult by the fact that I dislike much about today's world because my values were shaped by a different society than this one. I find it difficult enough to shepherd myself though the minefields that society has created for us. I am devoid of useful advice for anyone else. I can only say that, judged by yesterday's values, today's society is not acting intelligently. Were I a youngster in today's world I have no idea what I would do, because "things" are radically different than they were before a depression, a world war, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the invention of the internet, the rise of Radical Islam, etc, etc, etc...The best that I can do is to tell him to develop a useful skill that will prove valuable to others if and when society falls apart around him.