I don’t think that pursuing money is a worthy life goal and I don’t think that a good job means a job that lets you make a lot of money. I’ve never been more miserable and my life has never felt more meaningless than when I made tons of money at the age of 20.
Studying improves one’s quality of life irrespective of whether it leads to a well-paying job because it allows one to grow as a human being and develop needs, sensibilities and ways of enjoying reality that one would have never suspected existed. Of course, it’s impossible to explain any of this to people who never developed said sensibilities.
Clarissa's Blog 
I agree with this. I care more about having an intellectually stimulating life rather than making tons of money. But one would also like to make enough money to live somewhat comfortably . . .
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Yeah, that’s it! The money factor isn’t all that appealing to me. I’d like more, but I can make do with less. By contrast, my intellectual and inner life is extremely important to me. I need a lot of time alone to nurture it, otherwise there’s really no point in being alive. Once you get an education, you need to experience the benefits of that education, which means enjoying time alone with your own thoughts.
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That’s exactly how I feel. Having leisure to think and to grow is priceless.
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I am still a bit puzzled when you say you were wealthy at age 20. I suspect it is culture- dependent. To me, being wealthy means being able to afford, if one want’s it, ones own private jet and a full time crew, or at the very least their own full time lawyer. A large yacht is also evidence of wealth. Where did you fit into the spectrum here?
I agree that working primarily for money, beyond what one needs to survive, is unfortunate indeed.
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Why would I have needed a lawyer in a country with no legal system? 🙂 🙂
I mean that I had more material possessions than ever since. And more than I will probably have ever again. (I don’t consider mortgaged possessions to be such.)
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Yes. I think that after earning a certain income making more money does not make you happier, regardless of how much money you make. At one point in our careers my wife and I realized that we were comfortable and happy with the money we were earning, and earning more would not make us happier.
And I love my job so much that it is almost insane.
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Pursuit of money is one thing. Pursuit of money to obtain a degree of security is another. Many people conflate the two, which is unfortunate, but understandable. I actually think a certain amount of the latter is necessary for many people – it may be possible for an artist to starve in a garret and still lead a rich intellectual life, but for the majority of people I know, and I include myself among them from experience, being hungry and stressed and insecure due to lack of financial resources does not lend itself to thoughts other than those of the most mundane variety.
That said, I’ve had jobs which offered me career security and more financial recompense than I actually needed, but made me very unhappy, because my mental needs were not met by the job. Not everybody has this problem – they seem to be ok with very repetitive jobs that mostly don’t ask anything new, providing their personal lives / hobbies are fulfilling. I would find that soul destroying, no matter how happy I was outside of work.
I can see how it might be sort of tempting to write those people off as not having developed themselves, (I find it an alien mindset after all) but I think it’s as simple as different people having different thresholds for stimulation, just like any other animal.
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Maybe this is an American problem, but I think that we tend to define ourselves by what our jobs are. For instance, “college professor” sounds more impressive than “secretary,” and people frequently make judgments about others when they find out what they do for a living. Maybe the secretary has no student loan debt and can live a more secure financial life, despite having a lower income. Who’s happier? Who knows? This is an individual question and can’t really be answered, but at least the secretary doesn’t have the same financial pressure of having tons of student loan debt.
My dad was a janitor when he retired. He read the entire newspaper every day and read nonfiction, political stuff, as well as watched the news and kept on top of current events. He was very smart, despite never going to college, and despite never having made as much money in one year as I did in my first year at my job. His career consisted of being a shoe store manager, a bug exterminator, and a janitor. You don’t have to go to college for any of those things. It’s not like he adored these jobs, but he liked the people he worked with. To him, the relationships were more important than the dirty work. When he died in 2009, about 300 people showed up at his funeral. He might not have had any money, but he made a difference in a lot of people’s lives and was well respected.
You certainly do not have to go to college to have a life of the mind. Nor do you have to go to college to get a job. But if you want a “career” job that is better than retail, you do have to go to college, simply for a weed-out factor for people who are hiring employees. If you want a job that’s related to your studies, that’s frequently going to be harder to find; however, those who are serious about the liberal arts will be able to use their critical thinking skills in a myriad of different careers. We don’t train the students to think broadly enough about their skill sets, I think.
I spoke to five graduating English majors at the end of the school year, and asked what they were doing after graduation. One is working at Macy’s, two are working at daycares, and one is moving to Texas and starting a rock band. One was going to graduate school. Four out of five of those people could have skipped college for their chosen futures, but hopefully they learned something that will eventually “click” in their minds. Now that they’ve gone to college, though, and have lots of student loans, they’ll eventually have to take some kind of job to pay for all that. I fear that taking so much student loan debt on causes graduates to get desperate and take any kind of random job that they can find in order to handle the financial stress. In a perfect world, college would be free, and we’d have less pressure to find a job that can support our outrageous amounts of debt we accumulate for the degree.
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You’re a professor and N does highly-skilled work in finance, so I’m guessing you make at least $130,000/yr together. It’s easy to say you don’t care about money when you have a lot of it.
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I expressed the same opinions when I was a debt-ridden grad student who didn’t have 2.75 for a bus. My ultra rich colleagues at Yale were really miserable creatures compared to me because their trust funds turned them into sad and useless underachievers obsessed with appearances. I thanked God every day that I hadn’t been born in such a rich family.
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On the question of being able to be happy with very little, it is certainly possible. Here is the neighbourhood I stayed in, in Zimbabwe, for several weeks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVsrfaG1zg0
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For me, financial independence is important. I would not like to be one of the perpetual adjunct instructors. I wouldn’t be particularly good at being a starving artist. I enjoy learning on the job and putting knowledge to practical use.
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Nobody is disagreeing that financial independence is important. However, if one can’t be happy with ten bucks in one’s pocket. one will not become happy with 10 million. People with money do not necessarily achieve happiness. But happy people do make money.
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True. I love studying both the useful and the useless. For me, “useless” is trying to classify a spider I photographed Saturday. “Useful” study for me is on medical topics. I am trying to revive my high school math skills, specifically trigonometry, for amusement. No amateur home-building or pre-GPS navigation is planned.
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