You know the answer. It will be a description of a day far worse than yours.
You know the routine. It's a competition. Whose day was worse. Who suffered more.
And if the other guy's day was worse, do you feel better? No! You feel worse, because you lost the competition! You didn't suffer half as much as the other person, so you deserve less sympathy, less attention, and less love.
But does how much you suffer not only dictate how much love you should receive, but how much you deserve to be paid? If a person is making a lot of money, but they're also more miserable than you, doesn't that seem fair? What if they were making more money than you and not suffering? What if their days were fun an easy and they were making a lot of money? You might hate them. Somehow, if they're suffering it's ok. If a young lawyer works 80 hour weeks and never sees his family, we think it's ok that he makes lots of money. At least he's suffering. There's justice.
What if you're both suffering equally, but one of you is getting paid better? Where's the justice in that? No, you should get paid in accordance with how much you suffer. Every price must be directly correlated to a measure of suffering.
They have these pay-what-you-want type restaurants now. There are no prices on the menu, and you just pay what you think the meal was worth. What if we paid an amount in accordance with how much we think the waiter suffers? Or the cook? Because if the cook was having fun, and making lots of money, we might hate him and think he is undeserving. If the cook said, "You think you've had a bad day?" and followed it with a description of going to a nice farmers' market and having to choose beautiful produce, and then cooking it up into something tasty and wonderful that he really enjoyed making, among a really cooperative kitchen staff, you might say, "Yeah, I did have a really bad day, actually! In fact I had a much worse day than you did. Don't think you can compete with my suffering with tales of shopping at the farmers' market, ok? And I'm pretty sure that according to all the generally acceptable ratios of human suffering to income, you owe ME money."
The cook may not pay you, but maybe he'd give you a hug and other loving feedback and support, which may or may not make you feel better.
If you're not making as much money as you'd like, perhaps you need to work harder at cultivating an image of suffering. Then people will think you're working really hard, and not having any fun at all doing whatever it is you do, and they will pay you more.
In a bit of free association, this reminds me (as do so many things) of the Woody Allen Film, "Love and Death", and the scene where Sonia (played by Diane Keaton) says,
“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
Feel better about your misery now? No? Well at least you can use that displeasure to seem more deserving of a higher income.
Feel better about your misery now? No? Well at least you can use that displeasure to seem more deserving of a higher income.
