When I was younger and I imagined professional life, I assumed earning would occur on an upward linear trajectory. I’d start out making a certain amount, and make progressively more each year until retirement. Just like that.
In fact, that was pretty much how things were going (not including grad school) until January 2020 when I left my job to start a company. That year I made less than my first year out of college.
The idea of stepping away from a consistent paycheck to try something new was flat out scary, and in some ways felt like it didn’t make logical sense. Why give up a good and sure thing? Why exit the earning escalator that seemed to only be going up?
Well, I’d always wanted to start something, and I felt like the challenge and thrill of doing my own thing was worth the risk. I wanted more control over my time and creativity, and I felt like that would lead to more meaning in my work. And I didn’t want to look back and wonder what I’d been so afraid of.
But the fear was there all the same. And anxiety that took the form of, “if I earn less, am I worth less?”
Some of these meandering thoughts snapped into focus recently when I started reading the 2009 autobiographical novel My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. A passage in the first ten pages seized my attention such that I put the book down just to let it sink in. In it, Knausgaard is reflecting on how adults and kids perceive meaning in their lives differently:
“While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of [my father’s] days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another.” (p. 9)
That meaning in our life spreads out over time and experiences such that we have to start using abstractions to try to make sense of it struck me as so useful. Abstractions are hard to quantify, hard to operationalize, and especially hard to evaluate compared to more tangible things, like what we earn.
How exactly can you level the “value” of family against the “value” of your salary?
In some ways it’s an absurd question, and yet we make these comparisons, these trade-offs, in small ways every day. I think this is why money starts to shape how we spend our time in such powerful ways. In a world that becomes ever more abstract, money seems so concrete and so compelling.
As a result it becomes harder over time to make decisions that may lead to less money, regardless of whether those decisions may also lead to things like less stress, more social support, more creative control, or more free time. The logic of those other values is a bit harder to grasp as we focus on earning and getting ahead, and the things we may actually value most begin to lose precedence.
Most people when they are asked will say they value something like friends and family most. When you look at rankings of values on average across cultures, benevolence (“preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact”), self-direction (“independent thought and action-choosing, creating, exploring”), and universalism (“understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature”) score out on top. Unsurprisingly, when it comes down to it, humans want good relationships and some control over how they spend their time.
There is a common line of thinking in the career advice canon that goes something like this: “do what you love and the results will follow.” And results in this case usually means money.
I subscribe to a version of this idea, but not as it relates to money. I think the clearer we can get about what we value and why, and the more we use that orientation to shape how we invest ourselves in our work, the more energized we will be, and the better our work will be. And that good work will generate positive outcomes. However, those positive outcomes may or may not include always earning more money, but they likely will include a greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, such that the trade off will be totally worth it.