Have you ever had strongly disagreeing viewpoints with someone close to you, on a topic of great importance? I have, and I currently still do…
You see, someone rather close to me – let’s call her Carol – has a completely different view on money than I have, and in a way that we disagree on how to go about certain things. To her, people with money almost have a responsibility to give money to people who don’t have money. Now, I don’t mean in the sense of homeless people, or people who do nothing with their lives. She believes that people who work hard and who are smart just kind of deserve money, no matter what careers or jobs they have. For me, for example, I’m kind of a high school teacher. That maxes out my salary at around, say, $60,000 per year for a lifetime in the career. Most of my acquaintances began their first jobs post-college making at least $50,000, and have gone up from there – they will surpass my lifetime maximum within ten years at most in their jobs.
These are the situations in which Carol believes that the money-making acquaintances have an almost-obligation to give money to people like me, – or at least to do things that cost money for people like me – since we have no chance of ever affording it ourselves, through no direct fault of our own, per se.
And this is a point on which we disagree entirely. While I certainly appreciate when people do things like that for me, – and I know that I would do things like that for people, if I had the money (for I already do with the little money I do have) – I do not believe that they have any obligation to me. I regularly feel as though I am being encouraged to take inappropriate advantage of friends, family members, and acquaintances, because we so much disagree on this. For me, it is not seizing the opportunity, but strangling out every penny someone could possibly give to me.
I did, to a certain degree, select this work. (I avoided it for a while, because I hated the idea of the salary, I really did. And yet, here I am, anyway, teaching. Nothing else has ever piqued my interest. Though, I’ve had lost no experience in anything else real, really.) But Carol believes that people need to give me their money, give me their airline miles and hotel points and all the other benefits – not so much that they themselves suffer the loss, of course, but just so that I get to benefit alongside them – that their high-salary jobs afford them.
And, while I would love to find a partner in life who’ll provide loads and loads of money for our lives, – let’s be real: I’ll probably give most of my share away – that is the only person I would expect to provide me with money or benefits of any kind. And not because I’m lazy, but because there is something valuable for me to do, that we both see as valuable, but that is not up there on the high-salary scale. No one else even comes close to being expected to share anything but a little time with me. That’s why I have the friends, anyway, is to spend time together. Not to take their money.
I feel like I’m not saying any of this very well, and that I definitely am not making a worthwhile point… I’m just exhausted tonight. Today has been unique and somewhat terrible, as some days do turn out in life… I look forward to the balancing of the scale for today soon.
Post-a-day 2018
hannah ananas 