There are some people who make a life mission of “having it all” — being a parent to children, having a good job, living the dream life in combination… and they, their heads screwed on straight, have been aiming for this sort of life since childhood.

Since life is tricky, cumbersome, and many-sided, it’s not easy to “have it all.” Many barriers stand in the way of that objective.

The easiest way to succeed in life is not by working hard, but by being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Wealth is easily passed on in Western societies, and Canada, where I live, is experiencing an unprecedented wealth transfer as baby boomers die off and their relatives inherit. The first of the boomers have already begun to pass away. In just a few short years this cohort will be largely gone, replaced by Generation X and the Millennials and Gen Z. They too want to have it all.

Their soaring dreams are such that they come to believe they don’t have to work hard, that it will just be “given” to them. A sense of entitlement pervades the younger generations. With money drying up in a soon-to-be recessionary environment — which is overdue for hitting the economy, considering that it’s been a number of years since the last recession — it becomes incumbent upon the individual to save up his money while making investments in the stock market. Nvidia stock would have been a good bet a few years ago, before the AI boom hit, but now the stock is overpriced and market-saturated.

When you “have it all,” you can rest easy in your life. The key to the concept is a work-life balance, where you’re not killing yourself working all the time. 40 hours a week is about the max one can tolerate if one wants a rich, fulfilling and wholesome life. Working any longer than this comes naturally to high-powered lawyers and businessmen trying to establish themselves, but if you’re the average professional you shouldn’t be asked to work overtime too much.

Once, when I worked for a computer gaming company on the West Coast, I noticed that the programmers were being driven like slaves. Although they got good salaries, this was being eaten away by the extra hours they worked “for free” on projects with deadlines, projects that required them to be present longer than normal hours. There’s no point taking a job that will just have you working all the time. Life becomes a misery when we can’t get time for ourselves. And when you’re on vacation, put aside the email and the cell phone and stop being plugged in all the time. It’s unnatural to tether oneself to one’s past life when one is moving forward.

As for kids and marriage, if you’re a guy it’s best to marry a woman with a good income, that way if divorce happens you don’t get caught paying “hellimony.” If possible, let her make more money than you. This is part of having it all. There is a relationship penalty to pay when the woman makes more money — women generally like to have their husbands being in the financially superior position — and this is a cost that must be borne in mind when you enter into such a relationship.

Driven to mate, we sometimes make hasty decisions. It’s best, if you want to be happy, to wait a while before taking the plunge. And do date around. The optimum strategy is to hit on strangers, make passes on them on the street or in public places. This takes balls, but it’s part of a whole-and-complete life strategy.

The only way to guarantee you’ll be happy in life is to arrange things for yourself. You can’t trust others to have your best interest in heart, certainly not employers, but also not even lovers. You can rely on yourself, and only yourself. Learn to navigate life’s tricky shoals with confidence. If you can’t be independent in a major way, you can forget about having it all. It takes a certain attitude to secure the finer things in life.