Money Matters

Years ago, when I had changed careers and settled into a more or less stable job, I began to consider what options were available for a meaningful way to make a living. I was asking questions. How do people get into a career and get to do something they enjoy? Is that even possible? Does anyone pay you to do what you like, really? I was looking around at other people doing things that seemed interesting to me, creative work. When I found out more, almost always the actual work was not very interesting. Who wants to be a writer if you’re being told not only what to write about but more or less how to write it, down to the punctuation? Who wants to be a musician if you can’t be a rock star from day one? Who pays for what and why, and what are the sources of funding and revenue which create a job you can enjoy?

Not everyone has the urge or the moment to figure out what’s actually going on and how career paths work. The same impulse is easily distracted from thinking about jobs, careers, hierarchy, institutions, turning instead to a hobby, current events, cooking, TV shows, music. These days a new smartphone can take up most of your time, let alone social media you can access with it. Human curiosity and intellect would seem to have unlimited subjects to get into and away from the question of what the heck is going on and what am I going to do in this place.

I was making about $22,000 a year. Believe it or not, my rent was about $400 a month, yes, in Los Angeles, and so my situation was working out. Housing should be about a third of one’s income, or so I’m told. I was getting by and lived simply. But I wanted to do something else. I worked for doctors doing Workers’ Compensation reports. In retrospect I learned a great deal about a range of subjects, medical, legal, how insurance companies operate, how businesses can grow too fast, about myself. The incidental things we pick up seldom impress us as much as they should at the time. I wanted something else. I had followed TV and radio news and listened to talk radio for years. I discovered Pacifica. I loved to read newspapers and magazines and had only started to understand there were other ways of interpreting events outside the “mainstream media.” This is all tangential to where I’m going with this. I was looking for a career, defined as a job that I loved. I still believed against all experience that somewhere someone was going to pay me at least a living wage to do something I enjoyed.

Since I liked to read and analyze the news, and I also had been writing letters to journalists and the editors of publications since high school, when I found out there were organizations that did this kind of work professionally, I thought maybe that was it, my dream job at a think tank. I liked what academics were doing in these areas, too. When FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, advertised a fund raiser featuring Noam Chomsky at Kasey Kasem’s house, I thought this could be my chance to get in with the people who could provide assistance in a new career direction. I called and spoke to Holly, I can’t recall her last name, who was the coordinator for FAIR. Actually I think I first left a message on an answering machine, and she called me back. My message was likely clueless, “Hi, I heard about this event. I’m interested in participating.” When she called back, I’m sure I was equally callow but I asked what kind of donation they were looking for, $200, $250, $500? That got her attention.

I showed up at this thing in my suit from work. I wore suits to this weird little job. I wore ties. I did when I was a teacher too. I still do. Skipping the anecdotes about meeting Chomsky, Kasem, his wife, the guy who a week or so prior had shattered the glass eagle statue Ronald Reagan had just received at some awards show, and Jeff Cohen, executive director at FAIR, what I got was an opportunity to volunteer. They also appreciated my money. I’m not sure I even needed to donate so much. The volunteer work also got me in touch with others interested in politics and activism. I quickly noticed, however, that most of the people were doing the work for free. They were also volunteers. The organizations that did have paying jobs had only a few, and those persons were mostly engaged in finding ways to get funding and get others to volunteer. Their writing and media work were more like an advertisement than analysis, not the stuff I would have liked to do.

As volunteers we did some work that contributed to the reports and books, such as counting column inches dedicated to certain stories, counting the number of times and minutes certain experts appeared on news shows, the diversity of opinion or lack of it. But none of this was going to lead to a paying job. As a career track, I would have to start my own organization, which was about as interesting to me as opening a coffee shop and charging $2 for a cup of fancy joe and founding my own think tank was statistically less likely to succeed than opening a coffee shop.

In today’s Internet-enabled world, self-promotion is much easier. Still, time and money matter, and if all you’re about is working a hustle to get funding, regardless of what worthwhile insights you may churn out, it is not quite the same as discovering Relativity. Even producing your own independent online show that goes viral has that need to appeal to a market, “to go viral,” and depends on digital ad revenues. So the questions remain. What do people pay for and why? What are the sources of funding? What generates the sufficient revenues? Is the work really something you can enjoy? Not everyone has the urge or the time.

Ultimately, that’s why we end up doing what we do and contribute more to someone else’s thing by browsing for viral videos. Our talents and the skills acquired along the way get applied to jobs not exactly what we love but that have a source of funding or means of revenue generation to cover our material costs. But at what cost to ourselves? When do we stop believing we can do what we love and make a living at it? Who pays for that in the end?