Bear by Meta Penca
What your Teddy bear would’ve like to say to you every time you snatched him up by the ear…
Living Life and Money
Where is that nice balance between earning a lot of money, and living your life/spending time with your family/spending the money you make?
My sole motivation for going to law school was to be in a profession where I could make a considerable amount of money. This is also the profession where, especially as a young attorney (I am required by law to say I am not yet an attorney), you are expected to work endless hours. Although, for your time spend working you are reciprocated with a usually high monetary reward. If it is expected of you to work 80 hours a week, that basically leaves you working 12 hours a day. Those days are generally not mindless hours spent in front of a computer doing some menial task. Those hours a spent doing research (reading cases, legal overviews, and statute), thoroughly analyzing that research, and writing summarizations to head law firm partners and/or court documents.
At what point is this too much to handle. If you’re making that kind of money, you need time to spend it: doing activities and going places with the ones you hold dear. Making money is only one aspect of life. In order to keep one’s sanity, there needs to be a break from that occupation.
The other side to this equation is spending that time, in which you would be working, with the ones you hold dear. In the legal profession, you are paid by the hour (usually a hefty amount per hour). The hours spent with your friends and family are hours you are not making money.
I have yet to see this as a wide spread proper balancing. Is 70 working hours per week too much? Is 30 not enough? I guess we all make decisions and have to live with them. Those decisions will likely be based on what’s important to us. But the best decisions that provide the best results today, will those have unintended responsibilities that are not best for changing priorities.
