Make More Money by Not Caring
If you dare to care, you risk poverty
We penalize people who care for others and reward those who mostly care about themselves.
Think of the most important tasks a society needs done. Your list might include producing food, caring for young children and the frail elderly, educating the next generation and caring for the sick. Note how often the word “caring” shows up in this list.
That’s not a coincidence.
With the possible exception of caring for the sick, none of those jobs pay well; in some cases they pay so little that to take on such a job will consign your family to poverty.
And even in the case of caring for the sick, it’s important to note that the people doing the most hands-on care — the entry-level nurses — make dramatically less than the doctors who in some cases merely direct the care.
What’s on your list?
You might include people who build and repair our homes and infrastructure and a handful of other necessities, but I bet you didn’t include any jobs from the banking and insurance industries or advertising.
There is an inverse relationship between the importance of a job and how much it pays. You’ll make a lot more money as a stockbroker or a pharmacy benefits manager than you will teaching children to read.
Most of us have to choose whether we want to make a lot of money or derive satisfaction from our work.
When I first started working in newspapers, I wondered why the ad reps made so much more than the journalists. In the newsroom, we had to have a nose for news, an understanding of the libel laws, the ability to write well on deadline, a basic understanding of things like the criminal justice system, taxation, government and quite a bit more, and we had to work all hours of the day and night. But we were paid just a little more than we’d make working in fast food.
The ad reps drove nice cars and went out for lunch, but the reporters drove banged-up beaters and ate sandwiches at their desk.
The reason for this, of course, is that if you don’t pay a salesperson well, they’ll simply go sell something else that pays more. I don’t blame them a bit for that. But the old-school reporters would look for a cheaper apartment or live on generic peanut butter in order to keep working in the news.
We were paid in life satisfaction
Any journalist could, theoretically, have started selling ads instead, but in all my years in the newspaper business, I can only think of one person who made the move from news to ads — and she eventually switched back.
When I was laid off from my job as a newspaper editor, I volunteered in the kitchen at what was essentially an orphanage. I had worked in kitchens while in high school and college and enjoyed that work, and I felt immense satisfaction knowing I was helping feed children who had received a raw deal in life.
The kitchen director offered me a job, but she could only pay minimum wage, and I was at that time the primary breadwinner for my family and couldn’t have met our basic needs at that salary. I could only afford to volunteer there, not to work there.
So instead, I took a job at an ad agency for a couple of years.
I learned a lot at the agency, and some of what I learned has helped me as a writer. I know how to promote my books with digital ads and to use SEO to help my pieces on Medium and Substack rank higher on Google, for example.
But nothing I did at the ad agency served humanity better than what I did for free at the orphanage. Feeding children fulfilled me much more. It just didn’t pay enough for me to be able to afford to feed my own children.
We bestow status based on money
We use wealth as a heuristic for intelligence and drive. Many people assume a low income equals stupidity and laziness.
The world is full of advice on making more money. Little of it applies to people who have chosen their work based on fulfillment. The people in charge know when their employees really, really care about what they are doing. They take advantage of that fact so they can keep underpaying them.
With few exceptions, you can either choose to do work for which you have a passion or work for which you’ll be well-compensated. I suppose some mortgage brokers out there are truly passionate about their work, but most jobs that both serve humanity and pay well are limited to the medical field and require the ability to forgo a salary for many years of education.
People perform day jobs so they can afford to do their real work
Other than the lucky few, anybody who wants to make a living as a writer, musician or artist will either have to work a day job and pursue their passion in their own time or will have to accept some level of poverty.
Many fine artists work as commercial graphic artists. Many art photographers do weddings to pay the bills. Many novelists perform freelance SEO or copywriting work all day and bang out their fiction at night.
Others work a job completely unrelated to their passion. My husband works at a factory by day but records music in our home studio at night for fun.
People mostly do want to work, despite the claims by classic capitalists that providing any sort of universal income or even food stamps will result in everyone lying about doing nothing all day.
I don’t know anybody who truly wants to do nothing. I know many people who really want to devote all their time to things like gardening, caring for children, creating art and helping others but have to do something they don’t particularly care about in order to pay their bills.
It’s getting harder and harder to make a living
Working full-time isn’t always enough anymore. If you are pressured to work unpaid overtime or to let your job bleed into your evenings and weekends, when can you carve out time to pursue your passion projects?
It’s as if the system will not be satisfied until everyone is spending every waking hour feeding the machine.
Doing the work you truly want to do is becoming a revolutionary act.
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.
Thank you for this ❤️ I've always done "caring" jobs because they suited me best. It's a little hard to explain but I have real difficulty doing work that just exists to make a paycheck? At the same time I'm absolutely ill-suited to service jobs that might have a lot in common with caretaking except for the fact that the person doesn't actually need care, they just want to pay for the ability to not have to do things for themselves. It's not a problem to me that other people are happy doing those jobs, it's just that when I've attempted to do them I'm not the best version of myself. That's not to say there are no rude, unpleasant, or entitled people who require care all the same. I can still deal with them professionally when they're in a nursing home in a way that I struggled with when I was their waitress. I've worked with the elderly, animals, and children and none of those jobs paid especially well. It says something about us that I made the most when I worked taking care of people's pets, made several dollars an hour less (with much worse hours) taking care of their elderly parents, and made starvation wages (but the most "normal" schedule) taking care of their infants and toddlers. Worse than the pay though was the constant assumption by just about every single person I interacted with initially that I wasn't very intelligent or intellectually curious. Then if they bothered to talk with me eventually they'd want to know what I was doing working in that kind of job - the kind for ignorant people being the implication. There wasn't really a good way to say; "So I can sleep at night" without seeming to imply they shouldn't be.
Fantastic post, Michelle!!! Another fulfilling and important job that pays low money that you touched on just a bit was child care. A girlfriend of mine has worked for many years in child care at a daycare center, which is a huge responsibility that she is very passionate about. In fact, taking care of other people's kids, and keeping them safe & entertained etc., is about as big a responsibility as one can have. Yet it pays low wages!!! And of course, many of those daycare centers make sure that she and the other care providers get exactly 30 hours a week at most so they are not officially "full time" and do not receive any benefits or overtime.
I also think it's obscene that parasites like corporate lawyers make large amounts of money while caregivers and teachers do not. Yet under capitalism "success" is primarily defined by how much money you make, not what you contribute to the world. And being an avid consumer in the market is considered "contributing."