Thriving At Any Wage

My state has now, officially, entered into double digit unemployment.

Truthfully, we've probably been at 10% for a lot longer than anyone is willing to admit, and that's the problem...we ignore the number of people who aren't pulling unemployment (only 60% actually do), the number of people underemployed, and the number of people who simply don't fall into any category.

Here's my problem...I'm what you would call a snobby elitist. I haven't been in the unemployment trenches, ever. I don't remember my last part-time job or minimum wage job. I have been blessed with an ability to engineer, I'm good at it, and I make a very good wage. Honestly, I am completely amazed, completely, at how people find a way to live on 1/40th of what I earn. And I sit here and blog about how bad things are for everyone else. An elitist.

I wouldn't know how to live at the minimum wage level. But this I do know...I would live, and as richly as I do now.

I've often referred back to my dad's statement, now some twenty years ago (I remember the exact conversation), that one way or another, "the money will come." Implicit in his statement, lost on so many of us, is that you have to have full accountability over your actions, you have to be willing to adjust, you have to act. This is the crucial difference between someone who can thrive at any wage vs. someone who founders at any. In our America, more and more of us are losing our accountability, our personal responsibility, our willingness to act, to adjust.

That someone is willing to pay me a boatload of money to perform work I love doing, well, what can I say? If shit hit the fan, I would be willing to work for a quarter of what I make, perhaps a fifth, and still thrive. But this ability only comes from a lifetime of understanding how to live within my means, it isn't something I can just have, like a pizza. It isn't something that I can instantly assume. That doesn't mean I'd like it, far from it, but I would manage.