For years I have been working for nonprofits, consulting,
creating, directing. The first nonprofit
organization I helped to launch was a tiny one dedicated to creating curriculum
and programming for children’s peace education.
As you may imagine, I volunteered an enormous amount of time to see it
grow and even when I did manage to raise the money to get paid a salary, it was
a pittance compared to what my two M.A.s might command elsewhere. At the time, though, I was a single dad
raising a young daughter, and my time with her was so precious to me, the
ability to participate in her school and play so valuable, that I considered it
a fair bargain. Certainly, there were
months when rent was tough to meet and I grew used to level of poverty that
many know far more intimately. I also experienced a kind of shame in that
poverty that, I think, is particularly acute here in the US where the Myth of the Self-made Man
so dominates the thinking of the people.
That Myth I speak of, that opportunity is equally and justly distributed
among all, and if you’re poor it’s your own damn fault, is a complex and
powerful one, of course, and I will not get too deeply into it here. You will draw your own conclusions by the end
of this piece, hopefully with some new ways to think about it.
My real purpose here is to offer some thoughts about the way
we conceive of money and payment for the work we do. As a poet and a writer, I am of course,
passionate about language, and I revel in the act of swinging from words and exploring
their roots and branches. Let’s
consider, then, the word “salary.” We
use it so often in modern English and, particularly because of its modern
connotation, we spend a great deal of energy hunting the larger members of the
species. Isn’t a large salary, after
all, why we spend so much time and money going to the right college for
degrees, why we spend so much time and energy getting good grades in
high school? Isn’t a large salary why we
so readily change the place we live when its demanded of us, or why we spend so
much time away from our loved ones, and over-stressing our minds and bodies,
and placating the egos of superiors, whether we respect them or not?
The word
salary comes from the Latin sale, meaning “salt.” The word is a descendant from the Roman
Empire, which would reimburse its soldiers with portions of salt, if they were
worth theirs, of course. At the time,
before refrigerators or Ziploc baggies, salt was extremely valuable as the
primary resource for preserving meat and therefore feeding one’s family over
long periods of time. It’s a good
reminder, I think, particularly since salt is so cheap and readily available
now, of two important facts: a) symbolic currencies have never been more than a
means to the ultimate end of providing security, health, and happiness to ourselves and
our families, and b) when those currencies are no longer useful to that
purpose, it becomes time to consider them in a different way.
If you listen to elders on their deathbeds, you will find what
many researchers and interviewers find when they ask dying people what, if
anything, they regret about their lives.
Very often, people who are dying don’t really regret not having made
more money or spending more time at work.
People usually regret spending so much time pursuing money, at the
expense of time with their loved ones, or in pursuit of their deep dreams.
Consider then, the idea that it is not actually
a greater salary that we are all interested in—at least in the monetary sense
of the word. It is rather what we
believe money provides, which is security, happiness, ease, and freedom, all of
which taken together become synonymous with a Healthy Life.
The problem is a very old one, and one that many wisdom traditions speak
about at great length, which is mistaking the symbol of something for the thing
the symbol represents. In the Old
Testament, for example, one of the first commandments specifically warns of
worshipping graven images, precisely because when we give too much attention to
the representation of something, especially of the Divine, we begin to think
that the representation is the thing itself.
This notion of idolatry was so deeply ingrained that it included not
just literal graven images, but even verbal ones, which is why it was forbidden
to speak the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God. It is also why usury was expressly forbidden
in both the old testament and the new.
Usury, though it’s often believed to refer to charging excessive
interest on a loan, originally referred to charging any interest on a loan. The
reason for this is that money is by definition a symbol. It is the representation of the value of a
thing. I want a goat and you have a
goat, so we agree on the value of it and exchange a piece of metal or paper
that represents that value. That’s all
fine and it makes practical sense for trading merchandise; however, as soon as
I treat that symbolic representation as a Thing in its own right, something that can
generate more of itself through interest, I have committed the sin of usury. In fact, I have gone even further and created
a symbol of a symbol. This is also why, in the New Testament, Yeshua famously threw the money-lenders out of the Temple,
for profaning a place of direct connection with the Divine with graven
image-worship. (For a deeper trip down that Rabbit Hole, think about the stock
market, which creates symbols of symbols of symbols.)
So consider again what we so doggedly pursue in our careers,
that Holy Grail of a great salary. Think
of how fiercely we fight and lie and cheat—or even just how hard we work—all to
obtain more and more symbolic representations of what it is we are really
after, meaning and happiness and freedom. Think of the bankers and businessmen who threw
themselves off of tall buildings, or committed equally tragic forms of suicide
during the various stock market crashes, when the symbols they worshipped
revealed themselves to be hollow and they felt they had lost everything. The
good news in all of this is of course that if we are clear what the symbol is,
the graven image if you will, and what it is we are truly pursuing, then we can
renegotiate our salaries, so to speak.
We can include other forms of currency to symbolize meaning and
happiness and healthy lives.
During the time that I worked part-time in the nonprofit
sector and refused to compromise my time with my young daughter, it became
clear to me that I was being compensated in non-monetary ways for the work I
was doing. Not only did my position pay
me in units of Freedom, which I used to pick up my daughter from school and
volunteer occasionally in her classroom, it also paid me in units of
Meaning. I believed absolutely in what I
was doing. Developing curriculum and
programming for young people to learn about historical peacemakers, and to develop
skills in conflict resolution that could last for many generations into the
future—this was work that fit in perfect congruence with my values as a human
being. When I add these units of Meaning
and Freedom to the relatively small sum of monetary currency I was paid, my salary was huge
indeed.
How many people make great monetary salaries but hate their
work, or worse, feel morally compromised by it?
In such cases, I think we should subtract units of Meaning or units of
Freedom from that monetary salary to get a more accurate calculation. You’ll notice I’m not saying that the
monetary currency has no value at all—of course it does, but we have to
remember that it a currency—which is
to say a flow of energy that we measure in symbolic units, and the point here is that it’s not the
only one.
What I’m proposing, then, is a new kind of formula for
calculating the salaries of our lives and work, to see whether our labor is
worth its salt, so to speak. I will not
presume to tell you how to value your own Freedom, or the sense of fulfillment (ie.
Meaning) you get from the work you do, but I will ask you to assign some kind
of symbolic value to these universal life Goals. Call them Life-Chips or Freedom-Francs or
Meaning-Dollars if you like. Then add
those into your calculations when you decide how much your job is worth to
you. Of course, you might say “You can’t
pay a mortgage with Meaning-Dollars” and that’s true. (Though I would also point out that in Latin, “mortgage” translates to “death-grip.”) And it may also be true, after a fashion,
that you can’t put a kid through college with Life-chips, but you can leave
your children a considerable inheritance of them—and Meaning-Dollars, if you
gather them wisely. And with College
Debt taking its own kind of death grip on our young ones these days, which is a
wiser investment?
As a final thought, I think it’s important to mention the
power of our minds to shape our realities by the way we perceive them. There are many worthwhile conversations to be
had in response to my arguments here—about the privilege that my white maleness
and education afford me to talk this way, for example, or about the realities
of oppressive systems which have been deliberately created to keep
working-class people chasing money in a sort of indentured servitude. These are both valid points which I
acknowledge humbly and honestly. However
I will also submit that the great gift—the Divine Gift, if you will—of being
conscious human beings with at least some measure of Free Will, is that we get
to choose where to invest our time, our beliefs and our life-force. In this small regard at least, I think that the
Myth of the Self-Made Person is not totally off-base. And I hope that, as you consider how to
evaluate the profit and loss of your own Life, the Freedom of Time, the Meaning and the
Happiness—the true goals of a healthy salary—will factor in as much as the
paper and metal symbols of Money.
