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pretty well with the lifestyle. Plus, they don’t really have a chance of moving up in their field, so they usually quit around thirty to become housewives. Pretty much all the guys do it.
    Me: So why do you do this job?
    Him: Are you kidding? You don’t want to know how much money I make, but it’s a lot. A lot.
    Obviously, this is just one guy telling his rather extreme story (though I should mention that I later interviewed a pretty prominent fashion blogger who confirmed for me that she and many friends in the industry date almost exclusively within the financial industry), but it illustrates some of the problems we all face. There is a balance to be struck somewhere between enjoying your work, making a good living, and having time to do other things. And unless you’re doing a shit ton of coke (which this guy didn’t mention but which seems like a crucial element to the story, if you ask me), it’s not really possible to have all three at the same time. So being the “social life” guy may mean choosing ajob that is either in an industry that permits it (such as the food industry), or one that has relatively light workloads, which allow you a comfortable ten-to-five workday and no projects to take home and obsess over at the end of the day.
    If you’re the kind of person who wants to make a lot of money, that would seem more straightforward, wouldn’t it? I mean, hey, I’m not here to judge you for your Monopoly Man-esque ambitions. I can respect the desire to live comfortably and buy a new Apple product every two weeks without thinking twice about it. So why don’t you just find a job that is really lucrative, work really hard at it, climb some invisible corporate ladder, and reap the benefits? Apparently, it doesn’t work like that. We know that the idea of “working really hard” being directly proportional to exactly how much you will succeed is incredibly untrue in practice (no matter what you say, old white Republican males, no one will ever believe your success was 100 percent self-made). But it’s also important to note that well-paying jobs are kind of hard to locate in the first place.
    I think the job market is now officially aware that we’re all desperate. As I mentioned before, for every ad that shows up on Craigslist for some underpaid secretarial post, there are going to be about five hundred motivated twentysomethings with master’s degrees ready to get into the octagon and kill each other with their bare hands to get it. And this is only a slight exaggeration; people are desperate. What does a company stand to gainfrom paying someone a really good wage when they could get away with paying half of it and still have someone who basically bursts into happy tears every lunch break over his profound luck to have found this job? People are accepting lower and lower salaries for jobs that, if the economy weren’t such a clusterfuck, they never would have accepted in the first place.
    But what could be improved, pretty easily, is the lifestyle that goes with your job. Unless you happen to stumble upon one of the few industries left that is still throwing an expense account at every intern with good hair, you are going to have to manage your day-to-day life around it. First and foremost, don’t live in an expensive city. I hate to say it, because the whole world is basically screaming, “If you don’t live in New York City, you aren’t worthy of life on this planet, you peasant,” but that shit is a privilege. I mean, really, we all know people who moved to The City with not a whole lot in the way of plans or connections but a vague idea of “making it.” You know what they end up doing? Waiting tables, bartending, or working in a store—or possibly several of those at the same time. You know what kind of life that affords you in a city as ball-crushingly expensive as New York? A terrible one. I mean, yeah,