The balance between self-expression and making it (Part I)

(Photo by c_ambler, CC 2.0)

This is meant to be more of an exploratory piece. This is something for which I don't claim to have the definitive answers, but I think it's worth having a discussion. The subject for the next three afternoons is what it means to be within the scene while having to be part of a greater world. I intend to focus on interaction with employers, because that's where there is the most conflict that I feel self-expression isn't going to necessarily win a significant portion of the time.

First, I'll need to explain a bit of background about myself to give people some context about where I come from in regard to what I'm going to say. I'm in my late-twenties. I have a bachelor's and an MBA. I have a day job in an office, I utilize my skills from my training, and I make an adequate living. I'm not married, and I don't have kids.

All that being said, I think the first thing we need to focus on people's definitions of two things: happiness and success. What makes you happy? What makes you not necessarily happy, but at least something you can live with? What do you find intolerable? Does success directly correlate with happiness? What do you consider to be success?

There was a study done a few years ago that tied money to happiness in which a person would be less likely to have daily emotional downturns as he or she made more money up to about $75,000 per year. I won't go into the details here, since I provided a link for you, but in short, the idea is that the more money someone makes to a certain point, the less he or she has to worry about survival needs. At about the $75K mark, one doesn't have to worry about basic survival anymore and worries generally involve things tied more to greater enjoyment of life. I'm not going to attempt to argue that exact number here, because there are a slew of different things that can make that number go up or down. The point I want to drive home is the general concept that there is a certain income point in which your worries stop being about surviving and primarily involve living. Until then, the amount of money you make has an effect on your day-to-day happiness. (Of course, I'm making the assumption that your life doesn't have any sort of extreme circumstances. For instance, you could be making $250K per year, but if your sibling is dying from cancer, your daily happiness has much different stimuli that work on it.)

For most people in an individualistic industrialized society, such as that of the US, money is a big part of life. Your quality of life is directly related to how much money you make. Pooling of resources is kept to a minimum and is frowned upon in many cases. As such, the money you make purchases your status within society. Your ability to live starts and ends with your pocketbook.

So, I've sufficiently beaten it into your skulls that money really does matter in regard to happiness. What's my point? Obviously, the next logical step involves the fact that you have to have to find a way to get the money you need to live a lifestyle that you can reasonably tolerate. For most people, that involves finding employment that pays a sufficient wage to live. If you're someone who has inherited a fortune, born into riches, married someone with money, or is otherwise independently wealthy from ways outside of direct employment, this series of posts is going to mean nothing to you.

At some point in your life, if you aren't already an adult who takes care of himself or herself, you will be. You will have to find some means of employment, whether it's working for someone else or working for yourself. The vast majority of people are employees of someone else, and even among those who are exclusively self-employed, they still have to answer to other people, even if those people aren't direct bosses in a chain of command. As such, because you have to answer to other people by virtue of laws, company policies, and good business practices, you do not have full control over how you operate within the confines of the workplace environment if you wish to keep your job.

I know you're thinking, "I get where you're trying to go with this. Why don't you just cut to the chase?"

That's more for tomorrow's post, because I want to set up a good base, today, for people think about exactly why I'm saying the things I'm saying. I want people to really think hard about what it actually means to be happy and successful, particularly in a country like the US, and what you have to go through to make it happen. We'll get to the goth stuff tomorrow, but today, just think about what you think I'm going to say. Think about what your priorities are in life, but more importantly, think about how you will actually go about achieving the goals you want to achieve. Remember that I mention "balance" in the title of my entry, and that is something important you have to consider.