Ok, let's do the math. I'm 40. I picked up guitar when I was 12. I still play at least half an hour a day. Probably more like an hour. I'm noodling on it right now as I type this. I did this much more in high school and university. Probably 2-3 hours a day. When my little sister and I would watch reruns of the Simpsons or Fresh Prince, I would run over to my room to play guitar every commercial break. It use to vex my mother greatly. There are more than 7000 days in 20 years.
Did I mention that before I picked up the guitar, I was in music school for 3-4 years? Not private lessons, a legitimate European-style music academy I attended parallel to my elementary school. Theory, piano and choir. About 5 hours a week altogether. It ended when the war started because both my teachers left town as they were of the wrong ethnicity and didn't feel like waiting around to find out just how badly their lives would be in danger.
I grew up and lived until I was 14 in a war-torn place in Europe. My city was only really shelled at the beginning and the end of a 4-year war. Between that time, it was okay. The war was going on 30 miles away, but we no longer had air raid sirens like at the start. We all lived in small apartments you usually had 3 generations living under the same roof in. 500 square feet place was a big deal. Your dad was a director of a state company, perhaps. Mine was a high school teacher. He also went off to war and wouldn't come back permanently for 3 years. My mother was 31 and worried sick. Her nerves never really recovered. She sat around in the afternoons just dreading the ringing of the phone because, you know, it might not be a great phone call. It was a depressing atmosphere. Small apartment and a sense of impending doom.
School isn't a fancy daycare in Europe. It's not a place to keep you while your parents are at work. In grade 4, I had school for 3.5 hours a day. In grade 8, it was still only 5. I'd be home at 1pm. My school was a 3 minute walk from our apartment. You'd spend the next 8-9 hours outside, playing sports. What else would you do? There were power shortages on account of war, and even when there weren't, you had state TV in all its two-channel glory. There's a war going on, so guess what occupies most of the day's programming. Guess what you also don't care to watch when you're a kid?
In the summer, there was no school. I'd be outside from the time I got up and had a snack until it was time to go to bed. I had a 10:30 curfew when I was 10. Seems ludicrous now. Again, our parents had other worries. Your mum would call you from the window to come for dinner and you'd do your best to inhale it and run outside. As you got older, you'd manage to convince her to just tie a string around a plastic bag and lower a sandwich in it from your 3rd floor window. So as to not waste time. The kids who were lucky enough to live in a main-floor apartment just had the food passed through the window.
I moved to Canada at 14. I was the weird foreign kid at my public school. I'd have probably been better off at the Jewish day school, but that thing cost as much a University in annual tuition. No matter anyway, it'd only have been for a year. There's no Jewish high school in the city. I didn't have a lot of friends and my parents had no money for any extracurriculars. The friends I had were football and basketball mad like me. We'd come home from school and kick the ball around behind our apartment building. Or we'd go to my sister's elementary and shoot hoops. I was going to be the first person to play in both the NBA and the Premier League. Like Bo Jackson. Score goals for Liverpool and dish out dimes for the Jazz.
The winter is long and brutal in Calgary. Again, there was no money for a YMCA membership or any other membership that would have allowed me to practice indoors. My friend's dad was the super of our building and I would borrow a snow shovel from him and take it to the playground and clear just enough around the hoop to be able to rebound my own misses. I'd come home and if my parents and sister had gone out, I had to sit in the little atrium of the apartment building because my hands would be too cold and frozen and I didn't have the strength to turn the key to get in. I'd put my hands on the heater and then sit on them until the strength returned.
Did I mention that I gave no crap about school or grades whatsoever? I did maybe 10 hours worth of homework from grade 6 to grade 12. I'm an English teacher and I love telling my students how I had a grade of 14% in grade 10 English. Yeah, I had 5-6 hours after school every day to do things I loved. Shocking, I know! Where are the parents in all this? At war or working 3 jobs each. Take your pick. My dad used to get up at 3:30 to deliver papers, come back and nap, then go to college because his masters degree from Europe was worthless here. Then he'd come back, make us food and go deliver pizza from 4pm to 8pm. This is 21st century we're talking about, and he'd make 2 bucks plus tip per delivery.
So again, get the **** out of here with your WASP privilege and your kids whose dad pays(!) for them to play sports. No, I didn't fail to become the next John Stockton or Robbie Fowler or Jimmy Page because I'm a lazy loser. I failed because I wasn't lucky enough to be blessed by genetics. Or to a smaller degree, because my daddy didn't pay for me to get professional coaching. Whatever the **** that means. I thought professional coaches coached professional athletes.
