This article is irritating and embarrassing (as one who is about to commence daily appearances in this neighborhood), imho, for a couple reasons.
First, the unsubstantiated complaint of 'not feeling rich' without a definition (or even an attempt at one) of what it is to feel rich. I'm not even asking that the interviewees stop to account for things like health, successful marriages, or happy children - let alone such obvious luxuries as running water, electricity, and health care. Even if we restrict the notion of 'feeling rich' to monetary wealth, as we must in order to be faithful to the article's premise, the effectiveness of the piece would be aided by some perspective.
I have been a member of an upper/middle class northern California family for my whole life, an undeniably fortunate position by virtually any standard. But still, through my naivete and skewed sense of need, wealth, and the state of "being rich" even I can see that these millionaires perhaps do 'feel rich' without knowing it. I would suggest that 'feeling rich' means not having to worry about one of the 2-3 family cars breaking down, knowing that such an event will not threaten one's employment or send one into bankruptcy. Having a paid-off house should count as 'feeling rich,' even having a back yard in this day and age and in this particular bay area community. Not having to worry about being able to afford the kids' education or a medical emergency. How can these things, particularly when taken together (after all, they come admittedly as a package deal for these not-rich-millionaires) not qualify as 'feeling rich?'
Not being able to keep up with the Joneses, history dictates, is a horribly misguided way to determine one's success or failure in life. It is a symptom of that ancient malady, greed, the perpetuation of which we have somehow still not learned to control. How it rose to the "Top 10 most emailed" list is beyond me, the only news harbored in the article for me is just how materialistic America's most wealthy communities have become and how blind to the struggles and prohibitive disadvantages suffered by those in our country and in others who truly are not rich in the monetary sense.
This is not to argue that those caught up in the Silicon Valley rat race fail to recognize just how fortunate they are. But rather that it is surprising that a publication like the New York Times would devote energy and space to such a frivolous and misguided topic. If it's meant to be serious, it's a sad commentary on the community. If it's meant to poke fun and sarcasm at the wealthy and shock the world at the selfishness of Silicon Valley executives, it is too narrow to be fair.
The second point of interest and disappointment for me came with the obvious and yet unmentioned gender divide the situation evokes. For once, the divide has nothing to do with income, but rather has to do with differing responses of men and women to SV-sized paychecks. Men tend to respond by pledging to increase their 60 hour work week to an 80 hour week in order to maintain a respectable place in the pecking order. Women, on the other hand, seem to engage in a back and forth between wondering whether they deserve such excess and worrying that their lives are passing them by and considering the possibility that perhaps a reduction in hours is called for.
Note the difference between this:
“Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” said Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating service. “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Mr. Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. So he logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.
“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.
And this:
Celeste Baranski, a 49-year-old engineer with a net worth of around $5 million who lives with her husband in Menlo Park, no longer frets about tucking enough money away for college for their two children. Long ago she stopped bothering to balance her checkbook. When too many 18-hour days running an engineering department of 1,200 left her feeling burned out and empty, she left and gave herself 12 months off.
Yet like other working-class millionaires of Silicon Valley, she harbors anxieties about her financial future. Ms. Baranski — who was briefly worth as much as $200 million in 2000 but cashed out only $1 million before the collapse of the tech bubble — returned to work in March.
Along with two partners, she founded a software company, Vitamin D, and already she is resigned to the sleepless nights and other stresses that await her. “I ask myself all the time,” Ms. Baranski confessed, “why I do this.”
That today she is worth around $5 million, said Ms. Baranski, who helped to put herself through school cleaning houses, “was unimaginable in my 20s.”
“I always ask myself, ‘Do I deserve it?’ ” she said. “It never feels like you do, because that’s a lot of money.”
The author chalks this up to 'some people feel differently' but this is a cop out. Much remains to be said about why, while men respond with renewed aggression towards achieving that elusive income level at which he will finally be equal or superior to his contemporaries, women muse that they never expected such wealth and are not sure they deserve it or, in some cases, even want it. Men respond with jealousy, women with a different source of dissatisfaction: worry and self-doubt. Neither of which are healthy or get to the heart of any important issues.
Clearly the distinction that I have drawn may be illusory and the result of a statistically insignificant sample size. Also admittedly, hashing out the science and social implications of this dichotomy would require a measure of surveys, research, and scientific, economic, social and psychological analysis far beyond the resources of this author. However it does a disservice to readers to incorrectly dismiss the issue as a difference of opinion between purportedly identically situated individuals.
No comments:
Post a Comment