More money or more meaningful work?

I taught in a garden, among friends, and we lived simply, on bread and water most days and a little cheese when we wanted a feast. People thought this was gloomy. It was the opposite. We were among the happiest people in Athens, because we had stopped wanting what could not satisfy us.nnHere is the distinction I would ask you to make. Some desires are natural and necessary: food, shelter, warmth, friends, freedom from fear. These are limited and fairly easy to meet. Others are natural but not necessary, such as fine food, which is pleasant but not required. And some are neither natural nor necessary, the desire for wealth beyond need, for status, for being admired. These have no limit. However much you get, the imagination always shows you more.nnSo do the sum. How much do you actually need to live without anxiety, to eat, to be housed, to have time for the people you love? If the better salary is needed for that, take it, because poverty and fear are real evils. But if the extra money would go to desires of the third kind, you would be giving away your days, your peace and perhaps your friendships in exchange for something that cannot be filled.nnMeaningful work, if it is among friends, gives you time to think, and leaves you untroubled, is worth a great deal of money. A large income spent on keeping up is worth very little.

I went to live by a pond for two years, partly to find out what a person really needs, and I kept careful accounts. My conclusion was that most people work far harder than they have to, in order to buy things that do not make them happier, and that they call this being practical.nnSo let me give you a different unit of measurement. The price of anything is not the money. It is the amount of life you have to exchange for it, now or later. A larger salary that costs you more hours, more evenings answering messages, more of the restlessness that comes from doing work you do not believe in, is not more money. It is fewer days of your own, paid for in cash.nnMost people, I observed, live lives of quiet desperation, working to keep up a way of living that was never their choice. They mistake the means for the end. I am not telling you to build a cabin. I am telling you to look at your own accounts in my currency. How many hours would each option cost you, and what would you do with the hours you kept?nnIf the meaningful work pays enough to live simply, I think you will find you are richer in it. If the money truly buys you freedom later, and you are sure you will claim it, then perhaps. But I met very few people who ever did.

I took a year's leave from teaching to work on factory lines, because I did not trust philosophers who wrote about work without having done it. What I learned there I have never forgotten. Work that is meaningless, broken into fragments, done to someone else's rhythm with no understanding of what it is for, wears away something inside a person. By the end of the day I could not think. I could barely feel. The pay was not the problem. The work itself was taking something no wage could repay.nnSo I do not think this is a choice between money and a luxury called meaning. Meaningful work, work you understand, that uses your attention fully and serves something real, is a need of the soul, as real as bread. People deprived of it suffer, even when they are well paid, and often they do not know why.nnBut I would also warn you against a certain vanity. Meaning is not the same as prestige, or a pleasing story about yourself. The most meaningful work is often humble: caring for someone, making something well, teaching a child to read. Look for work in which you can give your full attention to something outside yourself.nnIf you have enough to live, choose that work. If you do not, earn what you need without letting the work take your soul, and guard some part of your day for attention that belongs to you.