WHERE’S MY VIOLIN?

My personal credit crisis. While I appreciate his candor, my sympathy meter hovers at zero.

Via Megan McArdle, who writes:

[For writers] this is what David Brooks calls "status-income disequilibrium" .... Everyone you write about makes more than you. Most of the people you know make more than you. And you come to feel that shopping at the farmer's market, travelling to Europe, drinking good coffee, are minimum necessities. Your house is small, your furniture is shabby, and you can't even really afford to shop at Whole Foods. Yet you're at the top of your field, working for one of the world's top media outlets. This can't be so.

And so the debts creep up, one happy hour or Colorado backpacking adventure at a time.

Now I like Megan McArdle. She’s intelligent, and an excellent writer.

But. What she writes about was called “keeping up with the Joneses” in my time. I did my time living paycheck-to-paycheck, squirreling away enough money away to (hopefully) retire reasonably comfortably instead of “keeping up”, and I don’t like being taxed to death to pay for those who weren’t willing to live within their means.

The sympathy meter is still hovering around zero.