Where I work, promotions, salary increases and bonuses all happen on one day, officially called ‘Compensation Day’. I’ve only been through three so far, but I hated all of them.
I am in the curious position of feeling overpaid as a human being (I am well into the top 1% of earners globally and I’m in my early twenties, which really is absurd), and yet at the same time feeling underpaid for the industry. A few weeks ago, I was asked to interview for a contracting job which would have more than doubled my salary. Of course, there is a premium for contracting, and I may not have got the job, but the recruiter was struggling so much to find anyone with those skills that he called back later fishing for names of anybody else I knew with the same experience as me.
The reality of being in this position is that I vary throughout the year between thinking ‘I am good at my job, I should get a raise’ and ‘this is absurd, why are they paying me this much’. As a graduate, bonuses are in my dad’s words ‘a token gesture’, with only very small differences based on performance. I didn’t have to worry about what I’d be paid as it is almost the same for all the graduates in my department. What I have struggled with however is my attitude to my salary.
In the UK, we are notoriously tight-lipped about salaries. I remember asking my dad what he earned when I was about 15, and he was very reluctant to tell me. I promised not to ever repeat the figure to another soul, and explained that the reason I wanted to know was that I didn’t really know how much ‘stuff’ I could get for a given salary. So when I heard that a job paid a certain amount, I had know idea how that translated into the kind of life you could lead. This is the kind of thing that teenagers need to know to motivate them to study! I had heard that jobs were ‘well paid’ or ‘low paid’, but I wanted to know what my lifestyle would actually be like if I got a job as, say, a lawyer instead of a teacher. Even now, I see plenty of jobs in the UK advertised with the words ‘competitive salary’. Why the big secret?
The reason, I think, is all about comparing yourself to others. Especially with the recession stripping away most bonuses in investment banking, this year all of the gossip was about who got promoted and who didn’t, because that is the socially acceptable way of deducing what people at your firm are paid. Promotions are the outward peacock feathers, even though of course there are variations in salary within each grade. So why are we so keen to compare ourselves to others? I think that the root of our obsession is that we are constantly looking for approval. We know that we are flawed, we often subconsciously know that we are “sinful”, and there is deep place in our heart that wants to be right with God. Modern society will sometimes describe this truth as ‘low self-esteem’ or ‘low confidence’, rather that a brief glimpse of our true state before God. If we label it a problem of self-worth, then one way we can feel better is to get feedback from others about how we are ok, about how they value us. Salaries (in large corporations at least) are therefore merely a representation of approval, and make us feel that we are not that bad, even that we are treasured in the way we are truthfully desperate for God to treasure us.
So then, if my trepidation about compensation day is to do with getting approval because of that deep knot inside me that sometimes cries out the truth that I am just not enough, the solution must be found in Christ. Because of course my own shortcomings are resolved only by the perfect record of Jesus being offered to me to replace my own tarnished list.
The problem for many Christians is that God encourages us ‘not to chase after the things of this world’. This can mean that instead of acknowledging our greed for approval from others and looking to God’s love to free us from our greed, we try to bury the desire for more money. I certainly try to ‘will’ myself into wanting less, caring less about money. I try to be less sinful by being an ostrich; burying my head in the sand and hoping that if I just ignore my bank balance for a while, my heart will somehow stop its constant cry for more.
God doesn’t actually ask us to desire less. In fact he wants us to desire more, just to desire Him instead of the tawdry baubles we find on earth. The book which first helped me to understand this, to expand and breathe into myself and understand rather than repress my constant desire for more is called ‘Captivating’ by John and Stasi Eldridge. It’s a book for women, and sounds really corny at first glance (especially as a reserved Englishwoman), but it is worth investing some time in.
As for now, the dreaded communication day has passed, I am still in the top 1% of earners globally, and since next year is the earliest I can be promoted, there are just over 51 weeks for God to work on my pride and show me the truth about my strong conviction that I ‘deserve’ to be promoted next year. Also, unemployment amongst the ‘youth’ age-group I still just about fall into was over 22% last week, so having a job is frankly, pretty great.
The Money Sparrow.
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