Where I work, somebody in an online discussion asked why anybody would hang around when they could get rich elsewhere. I replied:

When it's time to buy the farm, not many of us want to say, "Gee, I'm glad that I made all that extra money working on a stupid, pointless job!" Somewhat nicer to think that one's life contributed to peace, freedom, prosperity, a better chance for people to achieve enlightenment, and all that....

And if making a difference isn't enough, there's a factor that seems irrelevant when one's attention is only focused on good times (i.e., roughly the past decade) — namely, job security. Not many companies have been in business for 200+ years; maybe the Framers of the Constitution did something right. Take a look at the Japanese economy, and/or remember some of the down years that commerce in this country has experienced. I fearlessly predict that we will have serious Bad News within the next decade (maybe sooner), and that most of the current fluff will come drifting (or plummeting) down to earth. Be prepared to invite grasshoppers in the dot-com world to eat dinner, and to sleep on the couch, when they're suddenly unemployed....

Plus IMHO the quality of the people here is simply higher than any place else I've seen — both intellectually and spiritually.

I'm pretty happy that I took a ~10% pay cut to join this place in 1981!

Saturday, December 04, 1999 at 20:14:37 (EST) = 1999-12-04

TopicSociety - TopicLife - TopicPersonalHistory

(correlates: CriminalBehavior, OnTheMetro, DangerousGame, ...)