Creature Comforts

When I was nine years old, my family moved into a brand-new house. It was 3200 square feet and sat on a wedge-shaped lot, so the backyard was huge and would eventually have a large deck in it (that I would help to build). There were two sets of stairs from the main floor to the second, one of which led to an extra living room that was only used at Christmas. My bedroom there was as large as the master bedroom in the apartment I'm renting now, at least. It was full of stuff. I thought nothing of it.

I can't recall any specific instance of the house and all of the things within in making any of the people who lived there happy. Which isn't to say that no one was ever happy, but it wasn't the stuff that did it.

Most adolescents go through a process of rejecting their parents' values, in small or large ways, and I was no exception. There's never been a moment of my life when I consciously wanted to replicate their lifestyle or career path. They can keep their money and everything they buy with it; if it doesn't make you happy, what's the point?

But it did make them feel comfortable and secure, which is a vastly different thing.

A number of assumptions underlie modern middle-class life, so far as I can tell, something like:

1. A paycheque is a reliable form of income, because:
2. Employers can be trusted, industries are stable and economies don't undergo massive short-term upheavals.
3. People are happier when they live in larger houses with more stuff in them.
4. People get what they deserve. Therefore, a person or family with a lot of stuff clearly deserved it all, and a person or family without a lot of stuff clearly deserved that, too.
5. If you let go of the middle-class ladder for even two-and-a-half seconds, you will find yourself living in the street, eating rats that you roasted over a fire made of dumpster trash. The moral being:
6. Poverty makes life not worth living.
7. If you don't do at least as well as your parents did, you have failed.

The rules from your family may vary, but I'll bet the end result was the same.

1. GET A JOB.
2. The more money you make, the better.
3. Never let go of it unless you have something better in hand.
4. Use the money you make to buy a big house and fill it with lots of nice stuff.
5. Plant a few kids in the appropriate bedrooms.
6. Eventually you will get to retire and do what makes you happy.

This isn't, I don't think, what anyone believes leads to happiness. It's what people believe leads to security--to comfort. Except, well:

1. Paycheques are not reliable forms of income, because:
2. Employers are not trustworthy, industries are not stable and economies undergo massive short-term upheavals.
3. After a baseline income above the poverty level, increases in income and stuff have never been demonstrated to lead to more happiness.
4. No one ever gets what they deserve.
5. Some risk-takers are rewarded with failure, but no very successful person ever got there without taking a number of substantial risks, unless they were born rich.
6. Poverty is hard, but it's not death.
7. With housing as expensive as it is now (in Toronto anyway) it is enormously costly to succeed by surpassing your parents. It requires two incomes earned in long workweeks with unpaid overtime as a matter of course, and still living stretched to the limit and drowned in debt. Unless you're lucky.

Money has never motivated me. Given the choice between earning overtime or earning time off, I have always chosen time off, even when I couldn't really afford it. I went from the big suburban detached house to the apartment, and have not for a single moment missed all that extra space and the stuff that went in it. I went into environmental studies for earnest, idealistic reasons, not suspecting that one could end up with a stable well-paying job from something so seemingly impractical. Go figure.

Losing the well-paying part is no big deal.

I've taken pay cuts before. Nothing quite so substantial, but still. There are more important things than money.

"Stable" is another matter.

Giving up stable lends itself nicely to panic attacks. Even though I know quite well that in the 1990s the Canadian government laid off a substantial portion of their workers and illegally froze the wages of the rest for six years, making stability through government employment a myth. Even though I've been unwillingly put on strike at one job and laid off from another; even though I saw family members laid off from jobs they had worked for years; even though I know women who were told not to come back after their maternity leaves or fired when they got pregnant. Stability isn't real, it's just a persistent and very convincing story.

I consider myself to be someone who is normally comfortable with a relatively high level of risk. I work with risk, or at least I do for the next few months; understanding and applying risk butters my bread. I like taking chances, I like change. It's unusual for me to run into a change that feels big.

(Thump)

This week I get to tell my manager and colleagues, after already telling the internet. One might consider this backwards. What are they going to do, fire me?

Posted by Andrea at June 10, 2008 9:36 AM under Change Addict

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