Why Nate Thayer’s expectation of payment pissed so many people off

This blogger did a great analysis of the drama:

who is Nate Thayer thinking so highly of himself and better than us?  This makes sense; we like to think ourselves better than others, not the other way around.  We also really don’t want to think about how working hard =/= success.   It scares us and once you add some jealous, thus in short, we decide that Thayer is uppity, unrealistic, ungrateful, and possibly lazy.

There’s a larger issue here, and I’ve addressed it before.

The world is filled with people who think they are Writers because they bang away at a keyboard for hours. I wish good luck to everyone. I do.

But none of the most deeply thwarted or unrealized ambition — and there is enough of it to light L.A. for a century if converted to electrical power — justifies trashing someone who has actually succeeded in the field.  Someone who (!) chose to turn down an offer of $125,000 from The Atlantic to turn out six stories a year.

First cover of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. November 1857. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dozens, if not hundreds of writers I know, would kill for such an opportunity and will never ever get it. Not because we suck. Because it’s one of the very few well-paid spots ever available to any writer, with a Big Name Magazine that many people would also kill to even write for and will also never get the  chance.

Whaddya mean I can’t get it?

This is a deeply un-American thing to say. It flies in the fantasy that we are all — yes, we are! — such special little snowflakes that we will all get a ribbon or a prize or a trophy just for showing up and trying really really hard.

It does not happen that way. It is just not going to happen for many people.

This week on Facebook I’ve watched a former journo crow with (well-deserved, hard-won) delight that she is now casting major stars for her network television pilot. Do I wish I were in her shoes? Hell, yes!

But I’m not. And hating and trashing her for achieving something I’d reallyreallyreally like to have, but do not have and may never ever have?

Madness.

So those who are busy sucking their thumbs and clutching their blankies and hissing that Thayer is possibly

“uppity, unrealistic, ungrateful, and possibly lazy.”

need help, my friends.

He wants to earn a living using the skills he’s spent decades acquiring.

So do we all.

Your life looks so much better than mine

Portrait of John Jennings Esq., his Brother and Sister-in-Law (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s a great essay from Salon:

“We bought a new house,” my older sister said a few months ago, in one of our rare phone conversations.

“I’m so happy for you,” I said, though I’m sure the octaves and intonation were off. “You deserve it.” And she does. My sister has worked tirelessly ever since I can remember. Unlike me, she’s always been responsible, never leaving a job before accepting another, and certainly never leaving a job and then, instead of finding new employment, flying to Southeast Asia and staying for three months.

“We’re finally going to live in a grown-up house,” she continued. (By “we” she meant her two girls, ages 4 and 7, and my photogenic, equally successful brother-in-law.)

I loved this piece because it unpacks what we sometimes feel but rarely say out loud: I’m jealous, dammit! I want your life(style)/income/husband/wife/house/country house/cottage/car(s)/job/body/wardrobe/kids.

I want to feel like I’ve made it!

And I don’t.

Do I?

House-sitting for a friend was an eye-opening experience: a lovely, huge rear garden shaded by towering pines; a large swimming pool; multiple bedrooms; a home office; enormous closets; a washer and dryer unshared with others. I’ve never lived in a house with so many accoutrements.

She makes more money than I do, and I’m certain her husband significantly out-earns mine.

So, it’s comparing apples and oranges, right?

I’m hardly lazy, but I don’t work nights and weekends and really don’t want to, even if (which it could) it doubled my income. I take as much time off every year, and travel as far away, as I can afford.

I also chose the wrong industry for big wages — journalism — which pays, at the very top, in print, what 24-year-olds earn in their first year in corporate law or their Wall St. annual bonus. If you make it as a writer, you can make some very big bucks.

But if you don’t, you wonder what you did so wrong…

I avoided sibling rivalry by not having any, then, as the only child of my parents’ 13-year marriage. But I also have two younger half-brothers, one 10 years my junior, the other 23 years younger than I.

My 10-years-younger brother drives a very sexy shiny new car and owns a large house. He also lives in an airplane, traveling the world selling the arcane-but-popular software solution his company created.

Jealous? Moi? Well, yes, actually.

But my brother has a totally different skill set and works in a burgeoning field. He’s also been willing to risk his savings  to build his business and has also won a ton of VC cash.

My much-younger brother also travels the world, doing policy work so sensitive he needs a security clearance from the American government.

My father’s partner, a woman I really like and admire, has super-accomplished adult kids a bit younger than I am. One is married to a gazillionaire and speaks fluent Chinese. Oy.

I like feeling I’m doing OK. But, by many conventional measures, I’m not. People my age own and run major corporations or universities. They boast about their kids and grandkids; we have neither. They look like grown-ups while I often feel (and am, happily, mistaken for) a decade or so younger.

So — which is it?

Life is cool? Life sucks?

It’s too easy to look at other lives and find the flaws in our own.

My 10-years-younger brother, when I was once — as I often do — flagellating myself for my relative lack of success, pointed out that my generation had a hell of a lot more competition for jobs and a lot worse economy within which to get one, or several.

It’s all relative…given that millions of people in this world survive on less than $1 a day in income. The challenge is to remember this, not to focus on the in(s)anity of the material wealth flaunted before our eyes, by friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, let alone the mass media.

Times are tough, and with growing income inequality — with American CEOs typically pulling in 475 times the pay of their least-paid workers — it’s getting even uglier.

Do you find yourself feeling envious of others’ success?

Do you compare yourself to more successful/settled siblings?

Why Do The Wealthy So Fascinate Us?

A Newport, RI, "cottage." Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been watching, and enjoying, Downton Abbey on television the past few weeks, the story of an impossibly wealthy British family trying to protect their home and inheritance.

Why do we care?

Sure, the production values are high — the home lovely, the clothing meticulously re-creating Edwardian elegance. The servants’ intrigues and gossip mimic that of their employers, but still, what do we find so fascinating about the wealthy?

In an era today that has come to resemble the Gilded Age in its income inequality, where CEOs outearn their lowest-paid minions by 400 percent, it’s so much less…annoying…to stare in awe and envy at their gleaming motorcars, 20,000 square foot homes, billion dollar yachts, jewels and furs and nannies and neuroses than face our own frustrations and challenges.

As the U.S. recession drags into another year, now its third and with no definitive end anywhere in sight, the rest of us seem to take perverse pleasure in gawping at the rich, with television shows like “The Housewives Of...” ever-popular. Not to mention this show, in which spoiled brat daughters suddenly have to…gasp!…work for their money.

One aspect of Downtown Abbey is its timelessness — the family who own it are patrons of a local hospital that bears their name; I live a 10-minute drive from a hospital also endowed by the Rockefellers, whose enormous estate covers thousands of acres just up the road from where I live.

Their wishes have so altered this suburban New York landscape that my apartment building was re-designed — to be lower and flatter — so as not to spoil their magnificent Hudson River views. They even managed to shut down a local train line because it was…too noisy.

I worked retail from 2007-2009, the subject of my forthcoming book, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” (Portfolio, April 2011).

My greatest challenge? The sense of entitlement the worst of the wealthy carry with them, like some separate form of life support. They slap down their AmEx black cards, snap their fingers in your face, pout and whine when you say “No” to them.

No one says no to them!

Better we should focus our energy and our attention on less amusing sights — like our own work, families and income. After the necessities are covered, our real wealth isn’t material.

Pete Dexter's My Kind Of Writer — Hoping His Rivals Get Hit By A Car

Image via Wikipedia

The one fact every writer has to face, every single damn day, is the sad and ugly truth that some other writer somewhere is richer/more productive/invited on “Oprah”/winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Herta who?

I live in a town that also contains a Very Successful Writer who hangs out at our local diner, holding court, forever wearing black sweatsuits and sneakers. His byline is ubiquitous and, having met him once, his ego…healthy. I try, really hard, not to mind being so very deeply in his shadow and profess to some delight that my humor essay will appear in December in the same spot as his did, the back page of Smithsonian, earlier this year. Competitive, moi?

So I loved the fatal candor of Pete Dexter in today’s New York Times admitting what few of us ever cop to publicly:  “He generally has a hard time with the success of others. ‘Jealousy’s the wrong for what I usually feel. It’s closer to hoping they get hit by a car.’”

That sounds about right. As every writer knows, there’s always going to be someone out there who is thinner/younger/better connected/slept with their teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop/won a Fulbright-Guggenheim/got that teaching job you were so much better qualified for, who appears to exist solely for the purpose of reminding you — loser! – how puny, really, is your talent. It’s all so hopelessly subjective. No one can ever prove that their vision or reporting or lyrical descriptive passages are 32.6% better than yours, so when they end up rich and famous and you’re still adjuncting and eating ramen, why, whose fault is that, really? We need better metrics.

The truth we all know is that many Big Name Writers get there through talent and hard work — but with the additional and invisible lubricants of luck, significant and additional non-writing income, powerful connections and personal charm. Editors, agents and book publishers select whom and what to print with about as much certainty as a night at a Vegas craps table. Even the very best writers can produce a total dud after their first best-seller, so any writer with a functioning brain knows enough to keep a small piece of it reserved for humility. Just because you’re a Very Big Deal this very minute doesn’t mean it’s going to last.

One writer I know, with all the personal warmth and charm of a walk-in freezer, hit the Times best-seller list, the talk shows, the lucrative lecture circuit and snagged a full-time teaching job.

How…sad…I was to see her book stacked high on the remainders table.