I once wrote an article about being poor, and I started it out with a story about a friend who had spent some time explaining to my wife (who, at the time, was struggling to maintain a household of four on entry-level retail money) how hard up for funds they were, and how stressful it was. The zinger of the story, such as it was, was that the woman and her husband were both doctors. They weren’t bad people, but they came from a context where things like “being broke” had entirely different meanings.
Then (and now) I didn’t begrudge them the opportunity to talk about their stress; I’m sure their negative feelings about their worries were real. The tricky thing about hardship is that people tend to perceive all their troubles relative to the worst kind of problems they’ve experienced. I sometimes complain about being sore after doing a moderate, almost non-existent amount of exercise. I’m sure at some point or another I’ve done this to a person who ran marathons. And if so I probably was sore, but only judging by the standards of my personal frame of reference.
There’s all sorts of terms and experiences I’m sure I could apply this to, but right now the one that interests me most is the phrase a shitty job. I recently transitioned from having lived my whole life doing the kind of jobs you could do with zero day’s training and no developed skills. I’ve heard the phrase (and some classier high-end equivalents) since then, but it’s used much differently; it’s describing a different set of worries as experienced by a different kind of person living a different sort of life.
Wages, Non-Work Survival Stress, and You
I once worked a temp job related to paying out settlement money, a class of work that’s sometimes called class action lawsuit administration. The work mainly involved examining an endless stream of documents and was, as a result, immensely boring. For reference, imagine looking at the same line on an endless stream of mostly-identical documents, pushing either an “accept” or “reject” button, and then repeating this process hundreds or thousands of times over eight hours.
I mentioned the massive boredom of this process to a coworker at some point, and they looked at me like I was crazy. This is a wild paraphrase, but their response was something like this:
What are you complaining about? I don’t care if they want me to lock myself in a closet and hit myself with a brick for eight hours. I’m doing it. It’s so much money.
The crazy amount of money in question was $18 an hour.
If it sounds weird that this amount of money would be enough to convince anyone to do anything they had a particular distaste for, consider that the person in question had previously never made more than $14 an hour. Annualized, it was the difference between $28,000 and $36,000 a year. $8,000 might not seem like a huge absolute increase in pay, but for the subject of the story it was almost a 30% raise.
At a level where you are barely managing (or failing) to pay your bills, something like that might mean the first disposable cash you’ve had in months. The same decrease might mean not being able to pay rent. So while I know for a fact there are income levels where $8000 a year is negligible, there are also income levels where even an extra dollar an hour is the only thing you can reasonably consider; it’s potentially the difference between not surviving, surviving, or building up a (very small) buffer between you and disaster.
Now consider that real people are sitting around right now bemoaning the fact that to do the kind of work they want, they’d have to take a very significant pay cut – say dropping from $100,000 a year at an established company to $80,000 a year at a high impact startup, or from $150,000 at a soulless big-corporate job to $120,000 anywhere with even a speck of fun in the job.
I don’t want to minimize this complaint, because it’s real and it sucks. But it’s a fundamentally different kind of decision when all the necessities are covered, recovered and insulated from risk by an “oh-shit fund” of some kind. Would you take that big, soulless corporate job if it was the difference between being able to buy your kid’s clothes or not? Of course you would. But neither I (at the moment) nor most of the people reading this are playing with those kinds of stakes, so they get a little more freedom in how they choose their work without risking keeping their progeny shod.
At the time I was working in settlement claims administration, I had never decided to accept a job offer using any parameter but pay in my entire adult life. In the case of that particular job, that meant working for the least-good employer I ever had1 and doing some boring stuff. It wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t that bad; I didn’t die or anything.
Later on (as I accumulated increasing amounts of work experience) I found there were even more severe tradeoffs to be made. Even the skill-and-credential-poor can often work their way up to more money if they are willing to make even more severe tradeoffs in the bargain.
Meatgrinder Jobs
There’s a couple of ways to think about how difficult a job is. The first way has to do with the amount of training or ability the job requires, as opposed to things like hours or stress. No matter how hard of a worker you are, you can’t just walk in off the street and do brain surgery; the job is difficult in the sense that not a lot of people can do it, full stop.
The same goes for job titles like “software engineer”, “pilot”, or “cake decorator”; whatever other difficulties the job may have, the primary hurdles are ones of skills, talent and training. It’s a bit like this, from Death in The Afternoon:
All those jobs are hard in the sense that it’s difficult to do them at all, but that doesn’t tell you a lot about the day-to-day hassle of actually performing the work. There are at least some cases w
