Are friends/family shocked at your salary?

I believe I can, and I intend to ride this out as long as I can. Maybe this is an impossible dream. But I'm not done with it, not even close.

 

Good on you. I didn't know anyone was actually hiring. Hope you get one of those positions and have a better time of it.

 

How old are you and what is your family situation? I'm curious.

It's not about "money buying happiness." I think that's a grossly unfair characterization, although it's certainly one that passive-aggressive managers have used to guilt-trip their employees to great effect. It's about not worrying about breaking the bank every time you have a flat tire. It's about kids being able to run around in a big backyard. About being able to toss a steak on the grill on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon rather than boiling some hot dogs on the apartment stove top. About being able to take your wife to Maui or Paris or San Francisco.

"Doing what you love" is important, I guess, but I'm not quite sure when it replaced building a life you love. I don't think it used to be this way when our parents' generation entered the working world. A job was a job. Not that that was the perfect way to approach it, either, and it resulted in a lot of miserable SOBs, including my old man. But it seems that the pendulum has swung way back the other direction now.

 

The best advice I ever got came from a friend of mine who owns his own company and makes somewhere north of $2 million a year.

He told me two things I'll never forget....

"You want to stay in sports writing because you get some neat perks. Fuck perks. Make enough money so you can buy perks and then you get them on your own terms...."

"Anyone who tells you that you should do what you love to do is not being honest. Make as much money as you can and that will offer you the opportunity to do what it is you love on your own terms."

And for the record he hates his job and his business but he loves his life because his bank account dictates that he can do whatever it is he likes to do or wants to do.

This was two years ago and I laughed at it but the more I've thought about it, he is right.

 

Waylon, no two people have the same type of life. What I value is sure to be different from what you value because we're different people. For you, building a life you love sounds like it can be done with a job you don't particularly enjoy if you have enough money for a comfortable life with your family. That's great, it's what you want most, and you should go for it.

For me, I can't do something I hate and be happy. Just can't do it, no matter what they pay me. If I hate a third of my life, it's not really worth it to me. For some people, it is, and there's nothing wrong with that. All I know is what I can and can't do. Since I can do this, I don't want to hate 1/3 of my life, not when I know I can have fun working.

For the record, I'm 21 and single. Yes, I'm aware that situation makes it much easier to live the way I want to, but that's fine by me, because like I said, my mindset is only applicable to me.

 

Color me absolutely shocked -- shocked, I say! -- at your age and marital situation.

Also, you should know that there is a long continuum between the coolest, neato-ist job in the entire world!!! and "something (you) hate." The most perpetuated fallacy on this Web site is that everyone has two choices: 1. Be a sports writer, and love every minute of your work, even if it's for shit wages, shit pay covering shit high school teams in a shit town or 2. Hate your job.

Absurd. It's not an either/or choice.

Last night, I covered a high school baseball game and was pretty much bored off my ass the entire two hours, with a healthy side helping of, "What am I doing with my life?" I've felt that way at college games, as well, for the record. I actually can't wait to begin law school and engage my mind in all that material that is supposed to make me so miserable, in the process leaving behind the neato, skeato job that every man dreams of.

(And I do understand that I'm probably stretching your words a little bit here to make a point ... I'm probably doing some venting at your expense).

 

The first time I applied for a mortgage, the loan officer looked at me and said, "You lived on that?"

Fortunately, things got better.

 

See, that's the thing ... there's this false dichotomy on this site - and in this profession - that you have to choose between either slave wages for a "job you love" or six figures for a "job you hate."

There are plenty of choices in between, and when the job means spending nights and weekends away from your family, as this one so often does, to me it begins to cut back on the job satisfaction.

 

The thing that mostly strikes me about this business is that the people getting paid these ridiculously low salaries are very smart, very creative, very talented, very efficient people who are incredibly good at making deadlines. Just try to find a lot of that in the corporate world. It's not only that the suits are getting people to work for these slave wages, they're getting people who other businesses would kill for. When I meet other people in the corporate world, I'm sometimes astounded that they make so much money when they're so stupid or void of personality and talent. That's the kicker, not just the low wages but the low wages being paid to the astounding talent in this business.

 

And it doesn't worry you that there are dozens of people on this board who could tell you stories of feeling exactly that way at 21 and regretting it by 28?

 

And once again, not everybody in this business is working for slave wages or barely getting by. I am not the only one I know on this board who has always made a decent living in the newspaper business.
I doubt we are the rare exceptions. There are goods and bads in every industry.

 

True. I'm in the 40 K range, live in a relatively inexpensive area. My wife and I have a modest house and a decent savings. I get to cover something I really like and enjoy my work.

Of course, I'm also probably going to lose my job in the next few months and the list of people getting by reasonably well will get a little smaller. And it's going to keep heading in that direction.