No, really. The Harpies are, generally speaking, un-fans of NYT columnist Maureen Dowd. But as I’ve been musing over some life-changing decisions lately related to my career and financial security, I recalled another quote I remember reading somewhere. I looked through my books of quotations, but I couldn’t find it. However, the google-machine knows all, and I’llbedamned, it was MoDo. It may be the only smart thing she’s ever said, but when she’s right, she’s right. Her pearl of wisdom?
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
I’ve been settling for crap pay, and along with that has come a lack of respect for the value of my time, abilities and professional goals. And a new day is coming, my friends. I deserve better, and I’ve got a couple of tough, but necessary conversations in my near future.
Keeping in mind that we all have to choose our battles, what are you settling for?
I am also settling for crap pay. Given that I live in the state with the highest umemployment rate, I don’t think I’ll be able to change that anytime soon, alas.
I’ll have to settle for any job I can get as soon as my current contract expires.
Right now, I’m settling for a President about whom the best that can be said is “at least he isn’t McCain”. I’m finding the current political situation demoralizing in the extreme. We thought we’d have allies in places that mattered, but the message is loud and clear that we and our priorities are completely disposable.
Please, please can we have a Progressive party?
@Allie_Baba: My BF is in that situation, he’s an engineer in auto and for all the extra work he’s assumed in the last 15 months he should be making much more money but what can he do? He just feels lucky to have a job. He did get an email from the CEO the other week thanking him (and 3 other engineers) for all their extra work and the fact that all their cars had good sales the last quarter and that they know its been a very crazy year so at LEAST the higher ups seem aware of the situation.
I don’t feel like I’m settling for anything right now. Although recently I’ve felt like I’ve taken my good health for granted and should get out an be more physically active.
I am settling for fostering other people’s creativity rather than supporting my own. I need to do something about that.
Right now I’m settling for a lower-paying job than the one I lost this time last year, which really isn’t related to what I went to school for. I’m an admin to an academic dept at a college, and despite the fact that the job is “settling,” I’m happy for the generous sick and leave time, the benefits, the ability to take classes on campus, and the general atmosphere. (Can you tell I’m an eternal optimist, clinging to the bright side?)
I hear that, terena. I’ve been putting other people’s work (and work for other people) ahead of my own work. Which makes me resentful of them and angry at myself.
And in other “settling, then getting even less” news: the House Healthcare Bill. Check out this article from The Nation; the upshot is that the boogeyman of abortion (and the general misogyny of our culture) is resulting in bills that do not guarantee that ANY reproductive health coverage (annual pelvic exams, BC, and ferfucksake, domestic violence counselling!) for women will be covered.
I settled for a well-paid job that I hated for far too long.
I retrained to do a job I love – film editing – and then I settled for working as an unpaid intern for a few weeks, to get my foot in the door. It worked.
A couple years down the line, I’m progressing well, have been an assistant editor on a few feature films and cut three shorts myself. I still check the bulletin board for the place I trained to see if any interesting jobs crop up. I don’t know why, since it always makes me boil with fury: every job post is asking for people to do what amounts to assistant work for FREE. I’m not talking about the kind of intern work I did for a few weeks, which amounted to a lot of watching the assistant editor and the editor at work, learning, listening, picking up dailies and fetching coffee – I mean they are undermining my own ability to find paid work actually DOING the assistant’s job by asking people to do it, for months at a time, for zero dollars.
As it happens, one such posting was for a project that sounded really really interesting to me. So I have applied for it. I hit them with my resume, told them I could do the tasks they detailed standing on my head and in super-quick time. And only at the end of the email, did I say this:”I’m going to be upfront – I’m not comfortable with the no-pay thing. In my experience, you will save yourself time and money down the line if you can scrape together a few $s at this point. I will work for low-pay, though.”
I will probably never hear back from them, because there’s always a bunch of rich college kids who CAN work for free (trying not to hate. Ugh, who am I kidding? I hate!) while us plebs toil away trying to pay the rent, BUT I decided NOT to settle for working for free. And it felt damned good!
I’m settling for being a stay at home parent because getting out into the job market right now would be incredibly difficult and frustrating, but the cost of daycare, or even a regular sitter, is cost prohibitive until I get a job.
And, the PS. to my earlier post is – they just got back to me and we have a meeting tomorrow. So, on that evidence, I’d say MoDo is right. Truly, none of us should ‘settle’ for anything in this life; ‘put up with for the time being’ is a different thing, of course.
Diziet_Sma, congratulations.
I haven’t settled so much as sold my soul to the Devil regarding my job as the harpies well know. Maybe one day my debt will lessen enough that I can bargain back a portion of it….
Hot Damn, Diziet_Sma, that’s great! Fingers crossed that they offer you a sum that isn’t horribly insulting. When I wasn’t in school, I worked in an artistic/non-profit field that relied (and relies) heavily on the labor of unpaid interns. While there’s a place for work-for-school-credit type situations, and while I get the importance of apprenticing, NO pay is not cool. Accepting no pay can be a way of saying “yeah, well, my work isn’t worth it.” I think you did yourself a favor by saying “I’m too good to work for free, and you’re too smart to use an amateur.”
And “put up with for the time being” is where I’m at for the next few weeks…
Go, Dziet_Sma!
As I wrote in an earlier post, I settled for being comfy in a job where I was underpaid and undervalued. I settled for it WAY too long.
So kudos to all you sisters who are trying to get paid what you’re worth!
I’ve settled for living a place I had no desire to live, in order to 1) have a really good opportunity job-wise – which has worked out well so far, and 2) have husband willing to have kids, once we’d moved out of megalopolis. Now that we’re expecting our second child, and the product I came here to develop has launched and is doing well, I’ll be looking for another position after baby comes and I’ve been back to work long enough (probably a year from now). However, if husband would/could find a well-paying position of his own here, I’d settle for staying. At least for a while. I also settled on buying a boxy, boring house (but in good shape) so that our mortgage payments would be irrelevant. Again, not what I wanted, but long-term and economically, overall a good decision.
oh PhD painful topic.
I settle for a bad relationship with my mother. The other options are no relationship, or total sacrifice of my ideas to hers.
and about the pay thing … jeebus. Whole other story.
@Diziet_Sma: I wonder if I applied to that job too. I’m the same field, but less experienced. There’s only so many ways you can say ‘I can do these requirements in my sleep’ politely. Are you NY or LA based?
From what I can tell, it’s not about rich college students who can work for free; it’s about everyone being forced to get credits/make a reel anyway he/she can.
Crap pay, and no opportunities to grow within my work environment. With the market being crap, I’m settling. However I’ve decided that I’m going to stop relying on vacancies, be proactive and write to places I would like to work at, if only to see what I’m worth.
I’ve been wondering for a long time whether I’ve been settling within my current relationship (which I have a history of), or whether it’s just that I don’t know how to handle setbacks and disappointment. I don’t have much comparative and valuable experience to speak of.
I decided not to settle, and am broke, in debt, and working for too little money (adjuncting for rent, anyone?).
Still, I’m trying to be free. That’s worth the money-anxiety.
absurdbeats: except for the “in debt” part, I’m you, adjuncting (and doing other, even less personally and professionally satisfying work) for rent.
And sorry, rodriguez, didn’t mean to hit a sore spot. It’s a hard thing. There’s making a trade-off, which is what it sounds like elibard is doing, and there’s muddling through, which is what a lot of us (myself included) are doing with market as it is, there’s accepting a bad situation because it’s the best option of multiple crappy options (your sitch with your mama), and there’s just plain ol’ settling, which is asking for less than you deserve for fear of rejection, boat-rocking, laziness, or what-have-you, even though the situation is crappy and you know it. And work-wise, at least in one arena, I’ve been settling. Boo me.
I’m settling for a job that I absolutely hate because it pays well and gives me plenty of hours. The work requires me to use zero brains but stay busy for the duration of my time. I hardly even get so much as a lunch break. By the time I get home, I am too tired or stressed out to play with my kids but the alternative would mean not being able to afford the things they need.
I settled for a deadbeat husband (I am divorced now) because I fell for the silly notion that “all we need is love”. I learned quickly that it takes more than love to raise a child– it takes sheer guts and determination– 2 qualities that he certainly lacked.
I am settling for not fighting with the people in my house share, because I’m only staying for another two months and I really, really don’t want to move for that time.
Instead, I gave the guy who lectured me to not turn on the heater when my room freezing my cold. Kind of on purpose.
Guess who is not complaining about the heating being turned on anymore?
I guess settling is subjective. One might think I’m settling for living in a cheap apartment after losing my big condo, working at a job that pays less than my last job which I lost for reasons completely unrelated to my performance. But I’m happy, because I’ve spent the last few years trying to let go of as many of my materialistic impulses as I can. I guess I’ve gotten over any ideas of doing great things in my life and am happy to make a difference in the small circle of people whose lives I can touch. I’m happy with a small life, even though I may have felt like it was settling at one time. Maybe that’s just the cognitive dissonance talking, though.
At the moment, I am settling for doing my work to a standard that is below my normal standard because I have too much to do it all well, but I’m fairly reconciled to that. I’m more worried about having to settle in the future. I’m worried about settling for a grad school program that I’m not really interested in or isn’t really suited to me to be near my boyfriend. I’m also worried about not getting into any programs I’m really interested in and having to settle anyway. Sometimes I’m worried that I’m settling for a career that I find mildly interesting but dependable instead of trying to do something that I absolutely love every day, but I think that’s mostly a function of being in undergrad and not doing the really cool things yet.
Sigh. Mostly I am worried about settling for a life that is not as awesome as I want my life to be. Probably this is a very senior-in-college type worry.
@Dziet_Sma: Go get ‘em, girl!
@Mirelle: If you have a Big Life, I think you lose a lot of chances of intimacy and connection with what’s around you. Being a real friend and a caretaker of your community are as valuable as anything else you can do in your life. Acting locally really is worth doing.
I married a man I thought was ambitious and adventurous, only to find myself five years later married to a chronically underemployed addict. I settled for a long time, then realized I deserved better and needed to leave, and then he killed himself. I’m not sure what the moral to that story is, but I’ve learned that I can pick up the pieces and put together a life for myself.
@emilyanne @PHDork @BeckySharper @aspiringexpatriate @mischiefmanager: Thanks for your support! Wanna know the punchline?
I went to the meeting a couple hours ago, and we have a nice chat about my experience, yadda yadda yadda, and then the producer says “So, you don’t mind interning again?”; Me: “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t work for free”; Her: “Oh, but we did say interns in the ad”; Me: “But I said in my email. . .”; awkward silence. Turns out she hadn’t read the email to the end. I grabbed my coat and said it was nice to meet them, good luck with the project and to get back in touch if any paid positions came up and got the hell out of there before I started shouting and kicking the furniture. Yeah, so, not quite the inspiring sticking-to-your-guns success story I’d hoped to share! But you know what, something else will come along. The priniciple holds – if we don’t value our time, no-one else will.
@aspiringexpatriate: I’m in New York.
@Nimue: I think the moral of that story is, you did the right thing.
@Dziet_Sma: Damn! a) well at least you got to know someone who is still making stuff and b) I was hoping I could ask for their number, cause I wouldn’t mind interning if it got me into narrative features. I’ve been stuck in docs (which pays even when they have less money available-go figure). And I’m Los Angeles, so them’s the shakes.
i found myself, a few years ago, settling in a steady job that i hated and a relationship i knew wasn’t “the one”. the job was one of those mindless retail things where you’re nice to about a thousand people every hour and then you collapse on your couch and think about the monkeys that work for you. the relationship, engagement really, was to a boy (not man) that seemed like it would work out ok. not great. just ok. i quit the job when i realized it’s time had past years before. found one that i love but is unsteady and that sometimes scares me. i quit the engagement when i realized that i was short changing myself. i’m currently dating a woman that makes me smile whenever i see her, say her name, think about her… i think the old saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone works the other way around too. you don’t know what you could have until you have it. i didn’t know what i was missing. wouldn’t trade it for all the security in the world.
So…this is the same woman who says feminism, (ie, women refusing to settle for what they are given,) is making women of these days less happy than they were back in the day…?
Um…yeah.