“You hate when you come home from a trip with a lot of luggage and have to drag it up the stairs, or you’re in a huge hurry to leave and you have to run back up to the third or fourth floor dressed up in high-heeled shoes because you’ve forgotten something,” said Barbara Fox, president of Fox Residential Group, who lived for two decades with her husband, James Freund, in a 7,000-square-foot town house on West 73rd Street near Central Park. “And you hate when you have to have repairs because there’s always got to be somebody there to answer the door.”
This is from, you guessed it, the NYTimes, in an article about townhouse-owners in the city, and the drawbacks of owning a home that lacks “a doorman, concierge, superintendent or managing agent.” Part of me wants to make a snide remark about having a 7,000-square-foot house that you find too big to manage. But another part of me is simply intrigued that you could begin thinking of doormen as necessities for your living space. The more I’ve lived on the east coast, the more I’ve gotten interested in what people do with their money when they have it to burn. I don’t want to make unhelpful generalizations, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that the dominant view at home is that money is for stuff: houses, cars, and insurance policies on them. But here, money is for services or for experiences; as the lady in the article sums up, “I just got tired of not having the services that made life simpler for me.” Where I’m from, turning sixteen meant a car, preferably one with gadgets, if you had money to spend on it. But for much of the NYTimes readership, turning sixteen means a trip to Europe.
So, of course, with thoughts like these, I’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of each situation; more than that, however, I wonder at the way in which each camp seems to be quite sure that its way of doing things is much, much better than the way the other camp spends its money. And hey, I’m not immune. From all my National Geographic reading as a kid, the one piece that really struck me was an article about Hollywood. A hairdresser there remembers moving to California and, with no money for a shop or anything else, buying a pink Cadillac. I remember reeling from that, even when I read that the hairdresser said it was the best investment he could have made: with such a flashy car other people bought into the idea of him as successful, and actually made it happen. I’m glad he didn’t starve to death, but what a way to go about it!
I see this kind of split, too, with my college students and their choices about careers. Most of them are in engineering, animal science, or other fairly steady-employment-geared occupations. My dad would be proud of them. Sharing an office with several creative writing staff, I hear them encourage their students to continue writing, and the students replying (with greater and lesser degrees of sheepishness), “Well, I would go into creative writing, but I want to get a job that makes money.” Things you can only say when you’re 18 without some embarrassment. When I was in college many of my pre-med friends hated their schoolwork, and some even hated the idea of practicing medicine, but they were quite confident that what they were doing was superior to the work I was doing. Anybody, it seems, can read a book, but not everyone can a) make money b) suffer through things they hate to do the job that makes money. I’ve never been particularly tolerant of faux-martyrs, so I often let them have it, I’ll admit. But what surprises me is that, given their view of my work, they didn’t express more astonishment at the fact that I could really struggle with my work and make it take up so time. If it’s just reading books, why was I always working? I’m hoping they didn’t just think I was really slow! To be fair, these people may have had some run-ins with the artistic-martyr types who languish over each word and expect the public (the cool public, not the real public) to thank them for it. An amazingly slippery situation all around.
Not to digress, this need to defend one’s choice about the dream job/money job problem made for some real tensions among many people I observed, particularly when it came time to graduate and some had to fess up to “selling out” to business while others took great pleasure in announcing they were doing public service work. And I worry for both sides, because it’s clear that what you were “proud” to do was whatever had currency in the public mind, whether it was money or public service or the medical or law professions (which some might see as having the assets of both the money job and the dream job). Is it not possible to enjoy what you do, feel comfortable in it, without having to denigrate the choices of others who chose differently?
Erin
Alan Schmierer
Is it not possible to enjoy what you do, feel comfortable in it, without having to denigrate the choices of others who chose differently?
I find it interesting that you conclude an entry that puts down some other lifestyles this way.
First, at least the part of the article you quote there doesn’t say anything about the apt being too big to manage. It just says that it’s convenient to have someone there so you don’t have to take a day off from work when the cable guy comes. I could see that, and I’ve never lived anywhere with a doorman.
Second, you assume that people only go into medicine for the money. I think being a doctor is a very noble profession and helps a lot of people. Honestly, if I had to eliminate one profession from the earth between doctors and English (or Psychology) professors, I’d keep the doctors around. No offense. I don’t think any less of you for choosing your route, and I can completely sympathize with how much work you put in. But I don’t think having more doctors around is necessarily a bad thing.
But maybe I’m biased as an East-Coast girl working in a hospital (albeit as a research-oriented graduate student without a doorman).
-L
Hold on a second … where does Erin actually denigrate any lifestyle in this post? I must have missed that part.
Be that as it may, I think it’s a perfectly sensible position to say with respect to a certain group of lifestyles that we should respect them and not denigrate them and at the same time denigrate other lifestyles. For example, I think doctors, English professors, engineers, and so forth all contribute to society and we have no reason to denigrate people merely for choosing to pursue one of those lifestyles. But for all my avowals of respect and tolerance there, I am not in the least bit inclined to cease denigrating those who pursue, say, bank robbery as a lifestyle. Nor am I inclined to cease denigrating certain legal pursuits, e.g., rapacious exploitation of the poor.
But I suppose I should let Erin say for herself what she meant and how she intends to defend it.
Sydney
I realize there are a group of people who pick careers based on money alone and I hope they find fulfillment in the money or stumble ass-backward into a career that makes them happy. However, just because someone makes a lot of money doesn’t mean they picked their career for that reason, nor does the fact that they work for big business mean that they’ve sold out either. Maybe they actually like finance and complicated merger issues (or tax, augh). I don’t think that’s “selling out” at all, that’s doing what you like!
I just had an interview with the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development… are you concerned for me, because I would call myself “proud” if I got a job doing legal work for an organization that provides housing for the homeless? Why can’t our pride just be the result of a good feeling we have about the way we impact the world around us?
I picked my career because I love the law (probably the same reason you picked English), not because I thought I would make a lot of money. As it happens, I probably won’t actually be making a lot of money, but again, that’s really more of a side issue for me. I’m interested in doing something I enjoy in this world and something fulfilling if I can get it. I would actually do it for free, but I don’t think its ignoble to want to be financially solvent.
So I guess I don’t really understand the “concern” aspect of your post. Also, the moral of the story is that after reading your post about not making people feel defensive about their career choices, I felt really defensive about my career choice.
Let me be quite clear: I did NOT say, nor am I saying, that doctors and lawyers (and don’t forget engineers!) choose their careers based on money.
I was discussing a group of people that I knew had, to a large extent, chosen their career based on money. Being, say, a lawyer (since that’s the one you latched onto, Heidi), does not mean one chose a career based on money; choosing a career based on money, however, may lead one to choose law. It’s certainly a better bet than teaching kindergarten, if money is indeed the goal. Unless money is the reason one chose one’s career (whatever career that may be), then there is no reason to be defensive about my post. Even then, one would have to have regrets or moral twinges or apprehension about that choice to be bothered by what I said.
The other point I would like to make is that I’m not saying you can’t be proud of what you do. The quotation marks around “selling out” and “proud” should indicate that I was quoting someone else and questioning the way that these terms were applied in these situations, respectively. In the first, I was repeating a popular judgment of those who chose careers in big business (leaving the evaluation of that term up to you). In the second, since I was lacking a term for this, I was attempting to call into question the way that one’s pride in a career (in some of these situations under discussion) seems closely linked to public approval of that position; I had hoped that perhaps the pride could stem from something more closely linked to one’s own evaluation of the position’s worth. I think I would, as you indicate, Heidi, be quite proud if I thought I did something that would have a positive impact on the world. No quotation marks necessary there.
Apologies if my post seemed intended for more vindictive purposes. As I hope you see, none were intended.
Erin
i’m a friend of L’s and i got to this blog through her. I am about to finish law school, and even though I really do enjoy the law, I chose my career for the money. I’m not really sure what’s wrong with that.
And for doormen, I don’t live in a building with a doorman, but I do employ a huge amount of services — delivery of all of the following, including cooked food, laundry, dry cleaning, groceries, etc. I also take cabs everywhere. I think that services are more important to NYC dwellers because there are only so many physical things we can stuff into our tiny apartments, we don’t have cars, for the most part, or other ways to show off our money, should the desire to do so overcome us. And, if you’re working in finance or the law in NYC, the most precious thing becomes your free time, and you will pay good money to not spend it cleaning or cooking or driving or doing laundry.