hey english literature major

If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree.

suffering and contentment go hand in hand

Buddhist Way:

We know that life is suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we should discard the goods of life and practice abstinence.

Nietzsche's Way:

Fulfillment is to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that you harbor in your the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable...people for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences...almost as stupid as the will to abolish bad weather.

How does the New Testament console us for our difficulties? By suggesting that many of these are not difficulties at all but rather virtues:

If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out:
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)

If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil…your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22-3)

If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises:
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh…Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22)

If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)

There may be differences between such words and a drink but Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfillment:

The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became “goodness”, baseness “humility”, submission to people one hated “obedience” and, in Nietzsche”s phrase, “not-being-able-to-take-revenge” turned into “forgiveness”. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem “a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment”. Addicted to “the religion of comfortableness”, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.

Having a “Christian” perspective on difficulty is not limited to members of the Christian church; it is for Nietzsche a permanent psychological possibility. We all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health while the corners of our mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against what we have publicly renounced, firing shots over the parapet, sniping from the trees.

How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never. Put another way, to resist the temptation to denigrate and declare evil certain goods because they have proved hard to secure a pattern of behaviour of which Nietzsche’s own, infinitely tragic life offers us perhaps the best model.

- Alain de Botton

dream job / dream wife

To have a dream job is to have a job that you consider is meaningful within the greater context of your life.

Is it better to find your dream job? Or is it better to get the highest-paying job you can put up with and then in your free time, work on the stuff that coincides with your purpose in life.

18th century model:

Work: Hobby

Wife: Mistress

20th century model:

Love what you do (work).

Love who you marry.

How have we fared? Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs and dissatisfied with those who they married (divorce rate is over fifty percent). Instead of going around feeling sorry for ourselves that we failed in the game of life by not finding the perfect person to marry or finding the dream job that we should have, maybe we just have the wrong attitude or perspective. Who said that we were going to get that dream job or dream girl?

Instead, I think the better more reliable way is to go back to the18th century model. First, get a job that pays the highest that you're willing to put up with. Investment bankers make a lot of money but it's a hard field to get into first of all, and the hours, stress, and competition is the price you have to pay to make millions of dollars a year. Doctor, lawyer, and other similar professional jobs require years of training and study. There is no free lunch. So deciding which high-paying job depends on one's ability to delay gratification. In any case, find the job that pays the most that you can put up with, and in your free time, work on the stuff that provides meaning and flow for you, whatever that may be. This way you'll be both financially stable but also feel content and balanced.

Second thing, find a marriage partner that is chill. Someone you can deal with for at least ten years. Someone who is emotionally stable, frugal, reasonable, intelligent, etc etc. Passionate love, like any drug, can never last forever. Love is ultimately a verb, not a noun. You don't fall into love, you practice and build love day by day, year by year. Rather than a diamond that keeps on glowing from day one, love is like a plant that needs to be taken care of and nurtured and slowly it grows to be a thriving tree/flower/whatever.

I heard somewhere that ideally one should have three partners in life. One for passionate love/sex, one for raising children, and one for retirement, a companion that shares your interests. Now if you found a person that can be all these things, than that's great for you, but often I find that people who end up getting divorced got married for one reason and things start falling apart when they move on into another phase in life.

And for men. Most men just biologically desire sexual variety, even men who have perfect-looking model wifes....Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, etc etc. But I think men that they take the time to truly invest in a marriage and discover agape love don't have this problem. I think for most men, the reason they have mistresses is to satisfy their occasional desire for sexual novelty and diversity.

The top dream jobs people want, I noticed, usually have to do with: food, wine, film, art, photography, literature, journalism, sports, and helping people. The words that come to my head when I think about these things are: art, pleasure, creativity, love. The sense that we want to create something beautiful that we can enjoy and perhaps more importantly that we can share so other people can enjoy.

why you should do well in school

meaning of life: balance between work, play, love

In the absence of the threat of absurdity and nihilism, issues regarding the meaning of life arise when the three realms of love, work, and play conflict. For example, couples with young children often experience severe conflicts between love and work, when the intense needs of children compete for time and energy with the demands of career development. Young adults need to figure out how to render compatible the delights of playful pastimes such as sports and music with the imperative to get a job and support themselves. One of the few advantages of growing older is that the reduction of family responsibilities and the satisfaction or diminishing of career goals can make conflicts between the realms of love, work, and play much more manageable.

- Paul Thagard

focus

less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles

breathe

- Zen Habits

what's the difference between unemployment and leisure

Do you live to work or work to live?

it's your life

When I was working at an investment bank, people would say, "Patrick, stop working so hard, you're a workaholic. You're too career and money-oriented."

Now that I'm not working and relaxing and reading books on philosophy and art history, people say, "Patrick stop being a slacker. Get a job."

Everyone's a critic and no one's ever happy. Do what makes you happy. Don't justify the way you choose to live your life.

"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man."

– William Shakespeare

people skillz

"I don't know if anyone has ever told you that half the time

this business comes down to I don't like that guy."

Bye Biglaw

Life is not a sprint, it's a marathon

1. Age 65 isn't old - when FDR picked sixty-five as the retirement age, the average American lived to sixty-three. Today the average American lives to seventy-five. And by 2040 the average American will be living to eighty-one. Age sixty-five will no longer be the onset of old age for baby boomers. For you, it will be the beginning of middle age.

2. You're on your own path - There's no longer a predetermined path. You're on a voyage of discovery that could take you from project to project, employer to employer, employment to entrepreneurship, industry to industry, perhaps even career to career.

3. The only finish line is death - Just as the path you take is up in the air, so is your time line. The only finish point you should worry about anymore is death. Up until then you can do whatever the market and your skills will let you.

4. You're not a job chronology - Just as you're no longer your job, your career is no longer just a chronological listing of where you've worked and what titles you've held. You are a constantly expanding package of skills and abilities that can be applied to solve a host of problems or tackle a range of projects, large or small, short-term or long-term.

5. Just grow your money - Throw away all those frightening tables and formulas that tell you how much you have to be investing and at what rate of return in order to retire comfortably at age sixty-five. There's no more rote pattern. This isn't a race. No one is measuring you. Instead you've got a fairly simple goal: grow your wealth as much as you can, as quickly as you can, within your own comfort range.

6. Rethink risk - But you should definitely rethink that comfort range. Most folks have based their risk/reward analyses on retiring at age sixty-five. If you're a boomer and you're not retiring, you've got lots more time to recover from stock market setbacks—perhaps as many as twenty more years. That means you should stick primarily with equity investments far longer than those traditional charts and formulas say. Don't take your foot off the gas too soon.

7. Keep a liquid reserve - If you're going to keep the pedal to the metal, you'll need some backup. In the twenty-first century anyone looking to practice sound money management will need to have, access to enough cash to cover six months' worth of expenses in order to overcome detours along their chosen routes.

8. Cover your income, not your life - At the same time you'll need to have adequate insurance protection for when minor detours turn into serious redirections. That means maintaining the best health insurance coverage possible, and most important of all, having the maximum disability protection. Almost all my clients start off having more life insurance and less disability insurance than they need. I'll wager you're no different. The longer you work and the longer you live, the bigger a mistake that becomes.

Conclusion - Giving up the pursuit of retirement has a great many practical and psychological advantages. But it also has an added spiritual bonus: By eliminating the finish line, life stops being a race. With all of us on our own path there's no way your progress can be compared to anyone else's. No one—not your parents, your friends, or Money magazine—can look at your life and say you're not as far along as you should be More important, you can stop measuring yourself against an arbitrary standard and feeling inadequate for not meeting the grade. You're on your own unique self-charted journey. Where it ends only God knows so until then all you can do is keep rowing.

- Stephen Pollan

science major

It is to be noted that many students who come to the university intending to go into natural science change their intention while in college. It never, or almost never, happens that a student who was not interested in natural science before college discovers it there. This is an interesting reflection on the character of our high school education in general and science education in particular.

- Allan Bloom

What percentage of people who intend on majoring in the natural sciences do so because of intrinsic interest or because of career and financial aspirations?

Pre-Business Major

I think Allan Bloom has a point here about the university turning increasingly into a vocational school. But his opinion that those who major in economics because their sole motivation is money is to say the least absurd. Economics is a powerful tool that enables its practitioner to analyze critically individual and social behavior, markets and industries, and international trade and development.

He needs to make a differentiation between those who major in economics and those who major in business administration. One is an actual science , the other is a vocational degree. Like Bloom however, I personally hold little respect for pre-business majors who take only the bare minimum of liberal arts and social science classes. Accordingly though, they are the ones losing out.

I think one also needs to make the point that what Bloom is/should be referring to here is the MBA undergraduate degree. I believe no one pursuing a MBA graduate degree has the perception that they're getting a liberal arts education or a scholarly one at that. It is and should be a path to getting a more lucrative job.

The establishment of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the MD or the law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma is not a mark of scholarly achievement. It is a general rule that the students who have any chance of getting a liberal education are those who do not have a fixed career goal, or at least those for whom the university is not merely a training ground for a profession. Those who do have such a goal go through the university with blinders on, studying what the chosen discipline imposes on them while occasion­ally diverting themselves with an elective course that attracts them. True liberal education requires that the student's whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his action, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation. Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything. Otherwise it can only touch what is uncommitted in the already essentially committed.

The effect of the MBA is to corral a horde of students who want to get into business school and to put the blinders on them, to legislate an illiberal, officially approved undergraduate program for them at the outset, like premeds who usually disappear into their required courses and are never heard from again. Both the goal and the way of getting to it are fixed so that nothing can distract them. (Prelaw students are more visible in a variety of liberal courses because law schools are less fixed in their prerequisites; they are only seeking bright students.) Premed, prelaw and prebusiness students are distinctively tourists in the liberal arts. Getting into those elite profes­sional schools is an obsessive concern that tethers their minds.

The specific effect of the MBA has been an explosion of enrollments in economics, the prebusiness major. In serious universities something like 20 percent of the undergraduates are now economics majors. Economics overwhelms the rest of the social sciences and skews the students' percep­tion of them—their purpose and their relative weight with regard to the knowledge of human things. A premed who takes much biology does not, by contrast, lose sight of the status of physics, for the latter's influence on biology is clear, its position agreed upon, and it is respected by the biologists. None of this is so for the prebusiness economics major, who not only does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology or political science but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs to those studies.

Moreover, he is not motivated by love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with—money. Economists' concern with wealth, an undeniably real and solid thing, gives them a certain impressive intellectual solidity not provided by, say, culture. One can be sure that they are not talking about nothing. But wealth, as opposed to the science of wealth, is not the noblest of motiva­tions, and there is nothing else quite like this perfect coincidence between science and cupidity elsewhere in the university. The only parallel would be if there were a science of sexology, with earnest and truly scholarly professors, which would ensure its students lavish sexual satisfactions.

- Allan Bloom

Meaning of Life via BigLaw

Over the past generation, it's undeniable that the practice of law at large corporate firms like ours has become all-encompassing. Associates feel pressure to bill more and more hours merely to keep pace, and if the ultimate goal is to make partner, it can be hard to justify vacations, weekends off, or even sleep. Technological advances have made it possible for lawyers to stay in touch with the office twenty-four hours a day, and at many firms, that kind of commitment is expected.

In an intense atmosphere like this, where associates are forced to sacrifice other aspects of their lives in order to fulfill their responsibilities at work, we have seen an uptick in our attrition rates, with upwards of 80% of associates leaving the Firm each year. To combat the growing attrition, in 2006 the Firm formed a task force on Issues of Work-Life Balance and commissioned a comprehesive study of the matter.

What we discovered was startling. Our proprietary investigative techniques uncovered that nearly all of the associates who leave the Firm find themselves less satisfied, both personally and professionally, more prone to depression, and almost laughably poorer than those who remain. By a 77-to-1 margin, they say that leaving the firm was the biggest mistake of their lives, and that they never felt more internal fulfillment and reward than when they were working ninety-hour weeks performing mundane legal research tasks for supervisors they felt were less intelligent and less capable than themselves.

Our study has revealed, among other findings, that the meaning of life is hard work, performed without rest and without complaint, for purposes often vague and unclear, in concert with people you neither trust nor respect. And that those who seek meaning elsewhere are simply misguided, and in line for a life of failure and disappointment.

In addition, our study revealed that the most productive hours of the day, when young minds are at their peak ability to do the kinds of work a law firm job demands, are late nights and weekends, especially three-day weekends surrounding a holiday. Associates are cheating themselves out of some of the best working hours of the year if they choose to stay home on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July.

Other statistically significant findings:

Associates who divorce their spouses see an immediate boost in productivity, salary, mental health, and the chances of being assigned to do the kinds of intellectually stimulating legal work that brought them to the firm in the first place. These benefits are tripled in cases where the associate chooses to forego visitation with his or her children.

The most satisfied associates reported that they receive an average of 2-3 hours of sleep per night, while associates who reported an average of 7 or more hours of sleep per night found themselves most likely to receive additional assignments in the weeks following the study questionnaire.

Associates who eat take-out meals for dinner at least 6 times per week, ordered through the corporate intranet, showed significant progress toward self-actualization and an afterlife spent in nirvana.

- Anonymous Law Firm

Status Change

One of the remarkable phenomena of the eighties was the transformation of investment banking into a glamorous, even sexy profession. Investment banking used to be considered a rather unexciting job that involved courting corporate officers socially and analyzing reams of statistics. The social duties aside, it was seen, in many respects, as little more than glorified accounting and salesmanship. For business school graduates in other times, the excitement lay in corporate management, in running large, publicly held companies. The executives of major corporations were considered to be the ones who wielded the real power. Even within the business of providing corporations with advice, management consultants enjoyed more cachet than investment bankers. To many people, the transformation of investment banking into a glamorous profession in the eighties was baffling.

- John Taylor

Status-Income Disequilibrium

In the 1950s, when intellectuals socialized mostly with each other, they did not feel the pain of their own middle-class income. The rich were remote. In those days an investment banker went to Andover and Princeton, while a newspaper person went to Central High and Rutgers. But now the financiers and the writers both are likely to have gone to Andover and Princeton. The student who graduated from Harvard cum laude makes $85,000 a year as a think tank fellow, while the schlump she wouldn’t even talk to in gym class makes $34 million as a bond trader or TV producer. The loser who flunked out of Harvard and never showered is worth $2.4 billion in Silicon Valley. Pretty soon the successful intellectuals start to notice that while they have achieved social equality with these money types, financially they are inferior.

Imagine, for example, our worldly intellectual, now middle-aged and well established, at a dinner for the Society for the Preservation of Historic Chicago at the Drake Hotel. All night long she has been telling stories about Ted Koppel (emphasizing her recent Nightline appearance) and Bill Bradley (recounting their joint Aspen Institute conference in August). She’s kept the bankers and lawyers and doctors at her table enthralled. They retire afterward to the hotel bar for seven-dollar martinis and are joined by a consultant from Deloitte & Touche and his wife, a partner at Winston & Strawn—a two-ampersand couple. She is just as amusing at the bar, filling the air with inside dope about the publishing industry and magazine gossip. Feeling expansive, she decides to pick up the tab for drinks, putting it on her own credit card, even though any of the others could expense it, and when the whole group stumbles outside she is so overcome by the triumph of the evening that she blurts out, “Can I give anyone a lift? Anyone going south?”

There is an awkward silence. The ampersand couple says, “Actually, we’re going north, up to Winnetka.” One of the doctors says he is going north too, up toward Lake Forest. Suddenly it is all ash in her mouth. She knows what the neighborhoods are like on Chicago’s North Shore. The million-dollar homes stretch on for mile after mile. Some are Tudor Revival and others are Prairie School and Queen Anne, but they all are massive and immaculate. There are no weeds on the North Shore. Each house is surrounded by a huge spread of flawless lawn and masterfully landscaped grounds, with hedges so neatly sculpted they look like they’re made out of green marble. Even the garages are spotless, with baby joggers hanging neatly from pegs, and the Little Tikes kiddy cars arrayed in perfect rows, the floors swept and mopped. The renovators in those neighborhoods appear inside the house every seven years like cicadas, changing the paneling in the rotunda from cherry to walnut or back again. From the time those people wake up in the morning and set foot on their preheated bathroom floor to the waning moments of the evening, when they hit the remote to turn off the gas fireplace, they are reminded that life is good, America is just, and their lives are in control.

But the intellectual has to drive down to her university neighborhood in Hyde Park. She has to zip past the menacing housing projects, and when she returns to her neighborhood at 47th Street, she finds herself waiting at a stoplight looking over at a yellow check-cashing place and a storefront operation that offers low phone rates to El Salvador. Her building, which seemed such a step up from her earlier graduate school existence, is made of old and dark brick and is low and squat. The patch of ground out front, a scraggly excuse for a lawn, is practically bare, iron bars protect the windows, and the gate is rusted and ramshackle. She walks through the chipped marble vestibule—with its faint odors—and one flight up to her apartment. In Winnetka the doctors and lawyers are greeted by a grand entrance hall, but the intellectual has only a small excuse for a foyer which has shoes and boots lining the wall. She steps over the threshold of her apartment and finds herself confronted by a cluttered dining room table and looking into the kitchen. Suddenly she is feeling miserable. She is suffering from Status-Income Disequilibrium, a malady that afflicts people with jobs that give them high status but only moderately high income.

The tragedy of the SID sufferers’ lives is that they spend their days in glory and their nights in mediocrity. At work they go off and give lectures—all eyes upon them— appear on TV and on NPR, chair meetings. If they work in the media or in publishing, they can enjoy fancy expense-account lunches. All day long phone messages pile up on their desks—calls from rich and famous people seeking favors or attention—but at night they realize the bathroom needs cleaning so they have to pull out the Ajax. At work they are aristocrats, kings of the meritocracy, schmoozing with George Plimpton. At home they wonder if they can really afford a new car.

Consider the situation of our imagined intellectual. She’s earning $105,000 a year as a full professor at the University of Chicago. Her husband, whom she met while they were studying at Yale, is a program officer at a boutique foundation that takes Robert McCormick’s money and uses it to promote ideas McCormick despised. He makes $75,000. In their wildest imaginings they never dreamed they’d someday pull in $180,000 a year.

Or that they’d be so poor. Their daughter turned 18 last year, and her room and board at Stanford tops $30,000 annually. Their 16-year-old son, who has such a flair for music, consumes at least that much in tuition fees, when you throw in the prep school costs, the summer music camp, and the private lessons. The nanny who is home when their 9-year-old returns from the University of Chicago Lab School each afternoon eats up another $32,000 (they pay her legally because our intellectual still dreams of an administration post). Then there are the charity costs, which are high so they don’t have to feel too ashamed when they face their accountant each April (Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, etc.). All of which leaves them about $2,500 a month for rent, food, books, laundry, and living expenses. It feels like they are utterly poor, and of course they are suffering from bracket amnesia; as soon as they reach one income bracket, they forget what life was like in the lower brackets and so can’t imagine how it would be possible ever to return there.

Modern intellectuals are good at worrying about their reputations. But the person who suffers from Status-Income Disequilibrium spends a lot of time worrying about money. And it is not as if the intellectual these days fills her days with thoughts about truth and beauty or poetic evocations of spring. It is not as if she is compensated for her meager $105,000 salary with the knowledge that she can rise above the mundane pressures of the world. She has to spend her working hours marketing herself, appraising the needs of her audience, selling herself to producers, journalists, and her academic colleagues. The SID sufferer who is in publishing spends. his days thinking about market niches, the same as the estate-owning executive at AT&T. He has to do just as much artificial schmoozing as the partners at Skadden, Arps or the sellers at Goldman Sachs. It’s just that they are working in big money industries and the SID sufferer is working in a small money industry.

Today’s intellectual is at the butt end of the upper class. She is rich enough to send her kids to the private schools and to Stanford, but many of the other parents at these places make as much in a month as her family does in a year. Eventually the kids of the SID sufferer begin to notice the income difference between their family and their classmates’ families. It happens around birthday time. The other kids have birthdays at Wrigley Field (they’ve bought out a section) or at FAQ Schwarz (they’ve rented out the whole store for a Sunday morning). The SID kid has his party in his living room.

When the intellectual’s oldest daughter comes home for Christmas break, she’ll be invited to go hang out with her Stanford classmate who lives up in Winnetka. She’ll notice that when she visits the home of her friend, everything is uncluttered. The house is filled with vast expanses of table space and counter space and floor space, all of it luxuriously spare. Spareness is also the rule at work. People in that branch of the educated class have big offices with wood surfaces. And they have secretaries to route the paper flow, and their secretaries have secretaries to file things away, so there is nothing left stacked up to cover the wide-open expanse of the predator’s desk. The briefcases of the financial services Bobos are wafer thin, with barely enough space to squeeze in a legal pad, because their lives are so totally in control they don’t have to schlepp things from place to place. They travel luggage-free to London because, after all, they’ve got another wardrobe at their flat there.

The life of the SID sufferer, by contrast, is cluttered. She’s got a small desk tucked upstairs in the social science building. And there are papers everywhere: manuscripts, memos, journals, magazine clippings. And at home the SID sufferer has jars and coffeemakers jamming the available counterspace, and pots hanging loosely from a rack on the wall. The SID sufferer has books all around the living room, most dating back to graduate school days (The Marx-Engels Reader, for example), and there are frayed copies of the New York Review of Books lying on the nightstand.

When an intellectual with a household income of $180,000 a year enters a room filled with moneyed types making $1.75 million a year a few social rules will be observed. First, everyone will act as if money does not exist. Everyone, including the intellectual who can’t pay her Visa bill in full, will pretend it is possible to jet off to Paris for a weekend and the only barrier is finding the time. Everyone will praise the Marais district, and it will not be mentioned that the financial analyst has an apartment in the Marais and the intellectual spends her rare vacations at one-star hotels. The intellectual will notice that the financial analysts spend a lot of time talking about their vacations, whereas all the intellectual wants to talk about is work.

When an intellectual enters a room filled with financial predators, there will be a nagging doubt in the back of her mind: do they really like me, or am I just another form of servant, one who provides amusement or publicity instead of making the beds? The sad fact is that the moneyed analysts tend not to think this way. The millionaires are plagued by the fear that while they have achieved success, they have not achieved significance. They suffer from a reverse SID—their income is higher than their status. They have Income-Status Disequilibrium (ISD). After all, they have not done much with their lives that would allow them to explore their artistic side or to achieve intellectual immortality or even to be dazzling in conversation. The millionaires notice that they have to pay for all the foundation dinners they attend while the intellectuals are thought to be important enough to get in for free. The rich are the johns of the think tank circuit.

Furthermore, the intellectuals are, in effect, paid to be interesting. They are paid to sit around all day reading things that they can then redirect into provocative prose and conversation (it’s astonishing that so many do this job so badly). And the rich, meanwhile, are practically paid to be dull; they are given huge salaries to work on arcane deals that would make their dinner companions’ minds go numb if they had to hear about them. Finally, the rich feel vulnerable because, despite their vast resources, they still rely on the publicity machine for their good reputations, which these professional dinner party ironists control.

Therefore, many millionaires think it would be neat to be a writer whose opinions are queried on The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer. Look at Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News, U.S. News and World Report, and godly chunks of Manhattan and Washington. He’ll drive out to New Jersey to do a taping for the cable channel CNBC. It’s not enough to have more money than some countries. Zuckerman wants to be a public intellectual.

The intellectuals react in diverse ways to Status-Income Disequilibrium. Some try to pass for members of the money wing of the educated class. They buy those blue shirts with white collars. They polish their shoes daily. The women in this category save up enough money to buy a Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan suit. And if they are in, say, media, publishing, or the foundation world, they use their expense account to the max. Like an asthma sufferer taking the cure at an Arizona resort, a SID sufferer can find temporary relief when traveling on business. She can stay at the Ritz-Canton for $370 a night, with phones and televisions in every room. Hotel dry cleaning will be as nothing.

But then the business trip ends and it is back to earth. Which explains why other members of the intelligentsia go the other way and aggressively demonstrate that they still proudly adhere to their bohemian roots. You’ll see them wearing Timberland boots with their suits, a signal that they are still rebelling against the money culture.

Their taste in ties and socks will tend toward the ironic; you might see one wearing a tie adorned with the logo of a local sanitation department, a garbage truck driving over a rainbow.

At home this sort of SID sufferer will luxuriate in his poverty. He will congratulate himself for the fact that he lives in an integrated neighborhood, though he couldn’t afford the pearly white neighborhoods in such places as Winnetka or Grosse Pointe or Park Avenue. Most of all, he will congratulate himself on choosing a profession that doesn’t offer the big financial rewards, for not devoting his life to money grubbing. He does not mention to himself that, in fact, he lacks the quantitative skills it takes to be, say, an investment banker and that he is unable to focus on things that bore him, the way lawyers can. There never was any great opportunity to go into a more lucrative field, so there was never any real moment of deliberation of sacrifice.

- David Brooks