Career? What career? It’s more like careering from job to job than anything planned.
And yet, my career, vaguely defined, has been about making the world a better place. I’ve canvassed for political issues such as anti-nuclear, clean water, clean energy, affordable energy, equal rights for women, clean air, and on and on. I’ve worked for unions and worked for universal health insurance. I’ve performed economic analyses of single payer health insurance plans at the state level. I’ve analyzed many other things having to do with progressive public policies.
My consulting job ended a while back, and since then I’ve had my most lucrative gig working for a university, teaching young people to be good researchers. In addition, I’ve discovered fluther and have been trying to help people live better lives with all kinds of advice in all kinds of subject areas. If lurve means anything, you could argue that I do a decent job at that. You could also argue that I spend way too much time here, but who really wants to go there?
I did not pick any of this because of the money. Obviously fluther isn’t because of money. They’d have to be paying me about $6–8 per lurve in order to make it a decent job. I do it because I like it. Because I like the human connections it brings me. Human connections at just the right intensity. I get regular feedback, but I don’t have to interact with anyone unless I want to.
Most of my work has been ideologically driven. Sometimes I feel bad because I didn’t make as much money as most of my peers seem to make, but then, I have no idea what they really make. We’ve done all right, my wife and I. We saved enough to make it through the tough times without worrying much. So I can’t complain about the money, even if I wasn’t the one who made most of it.
So no. It wasn’t the money.