Hawking Radio Ghost

day 220

i think i'll let people request stuff for me to draw. though, no guarantee i'll draw everything cuz i want weird or dumb ideas. that's how i like it.

—$30k is what you can expect to make early on in your career if you work in education or the arts

—$50k (which I’d say is the average of what roughly what my dad made across my childhood) is a middle class wage, a good wage, not enough for wealth, but respectable

—$70k is good money, what a person who started out making $50k should aspire to. If someone we knew made that right out of college we were dazzled

—$100k and up is “big money.” Six figures, the magic number. “I bet so-and-so makes six figures,” was something I heard at the dinner table. Someone who made this much was different than us.

This model stuck with me for most of my teenhood and early adulthood; before I ever started thinking seriously about wages, it was my logical and emotional reference point for what a salary meant for a person’s material reality. I think this is likely a model that’s familiar to a lot of Americans who grew up lower middle class.

Anyways, I have probably told a version of this story before, but I return to this example and model a lot because the entire structure has shifted down an entire rung between when I graduated college and now in 2016. The $50k I had in my head when I was growing up is now the $70k I had in my head. The $70k is now, roughly, the $100k. Any time I have to make an emotionally loaded money decision I have to take my inner child aside and make this adjustment again.

Love those tiger stripes 💅