As a rule labor gratifies the performer only mediately, namely, through the removal of uneasiness which the attainment of the end brings about. The worker gives up leisure and submits to the disutility of labor in order to enjoy either the product or what other people are ready to give him for it. The expenditure of labor is for him a means for the attainment of certain ends, a price paid and a cost incurred[...]. There are some kinds of labor of which, under special conditions, small quantities provide immediate gratification. But these quantities are so insignificant that they do not play any role at all in the complex of human action and production for the satisfaction of wants. Our world is characterized by the phenomenon of the disutility of labor. People trade the disutility-bringing labor for the products of labor; labor is for them a
source of mediate gratification.
I'm For Sale
by Genevieve Smith
When I was 26, my then roommate was a great scavenger of furniture. One day, she came home with a daybed frame: a twin-size wooden box with only three legs, which is likely why someone had left it on a curb in the first place. The frame sat propped against our dining room wall for the next year, until I moved in with my boyfriend (now husband), and she let us take it. My husband made a fourth leg out of salvaged wood, and we found a cushion that more or less fit the frame in the "as is" section of IKEA. The back was constructed from a mattress pad rolled up and stuffed into a homemade pillowcase, and the whole ensemble was eventually covered with some black corduroy fabric that we bought for $10. All told, I think we spent about $40 on the "couch." That was six years ago. At the time, I thought of our jury-rigged furniture as a temporary arrangement, a way station on the path to adulthood. Now it serves as a reminder of how slow and grueling the road to financial security can be.
Which brings me to a second anecdote, one that occurred about a year ago. Over a plate of pasta one night, my husband told me that I needed to make more money. I don't remember what prompted it, whether we were discussing saving for a down payment or planning a vacation, but regardless of the topic, it was hard to argue with his point. If I really wanted the things I said I did, we'd need more than we were bringing in, than I was bringing in, because, as he implied, I was the one who wasn't really holding up my end.
My husband and I both chose careers in so-called creative professions—he in architecture, I in magazines. Both are fields in which the prestige often outstrips the financial rewards, but for years that was fine by me. Beyond the fact of having a paycheck, I’d never really thought it mattered how much I actually brought home. Instead, every major career decision I made I'd decided with my heart, not my bank account. My first job, at a nonprofit, paid $23,000 a year. When I decided to pursue journalism, I got a job at a glossy financial magazine, but a year and a half later, I happily left it to work at my favorite publication, accepting a $31,000 salary—and a $20,000 pay cut in the process. Four-plus years passed, and, at 30, I still hadn't closed the gap on those lost wages. Still, I had no doubt that I'd made the right decision. I loved the work and my colleagues, and I thought of my relative poverty as the price I had to pay. As a friend said of her own professional choices, "I cared about career success. I didn't care about security."
But then something began to shift: My thin resources started to bump against some serious pent-up consumptive desire. I wanted to buy things, mostly shoes, but also vacations, a dog, organic produce, dinners out, drinks. Eventually, I grew tired of our used furniture, IKEA shelving, Chinatown bus tickets—the couch. I didn't want to feel this abject guilt every time I swiped the credit card, a sense that I was pushing our dreams of children and a home further away with every discretionary purchase. What I didn't understand when I graduated college was that following your passions wouldn't always be enough. Sometimes you'd want those other things, too.
Occasionally when I look at my spotty financial history, I wonder if there isn't something self-defeating in my attraction to underpaid work, if perhaps all the talk of fulfillment is just masking a deep-seated unease with being in the driver's seat. Even if I can't always identify it, I can sense there's some insecurity that would be left untouched as long as my income never reached an actionable amount. "Maybe I don't like money on some deep subliminal level. I’m really bad at getting paid to do what I do," was how the 31-year-old writer Emily Gould put it to me over dinner one evening this past fall. Gould had written candidly about going broke after publishing her book of essays, And the Heart Says Whatever, at 28. "I spent a lot of the past year trying to figure out what, besides writing, I could do to make money," she wrote on her blog. "I had lunches and informational interviews. I found out about the viability of selling my eggs (I have one more year!)…. Mostly, though, I wrote things no one paid me to write and borrowed lots of money just to be able to live."
She scraped by with temping and occasionally teaching yoga. "I was really rolling the dice," she said of her failed experiments to reinvent herself. "People are loath to hire a 30-year-old who has to be an assistant.” Eventually, she came up with an idea for an independent e-bookstore, which she launched in 2011 with the help of her best friend. It might be only slightly more lucrative than being an essayist, but, as she wrote at its announcement, “just realizing that there was something I am capable of doing besides writing was enough to give me hope that I will, piece by piece, begin to figure out the rest of my life.” She’s also suggested a recasting of the adage "Do what you love and the money will follow,” which, she writes, “is great advice for people who love neurosurgery or filing briefs. ‘Do what you love 70 percent of the time and spend the rest of the time doing various things you hate, or that are difficult for you, and see what happens’ might be better advice.” But it was also clear as we talked that she still held fast to the idea that if she kept writing, the money would somehow follow. "I’m aware that my plan, which is to be an exception, is a bad plan," she said. “That’s my dream. I can’t make it not my dream. I want to own a brownstone and have a baby, and right now I have $12,000 in credit-card debt and haven’t had a paycheck larger than $100 since July."
Read the rest here.
It sounds more like she's over-egoed, than underpaid.
ReplyDeleteJust Sayin'.