So... somewhat long rant, more to vent than anything else, because I don't want to express the frustration I'm feeling in person to my anti-Mustachian friends...
tl;dr version up top: a friend is making increasingly resentful comments about how easy I have things, when I've been helping them for years with work, and have just realised they are on a similar income...
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The background is: I have a secure ongoing position in a university, but some recent personnel changes have meant that I've been casting around to see whether I can move somewhere else. We have enough FU money that, if we needed to, we could live on a single minimum-wage job across the whole household - and sometimes that's actually pretty tempting... But the current plan is to preserve something like our current income for at least three years, which gives us enough for a modest FIRE, and then reassess when we reach that point to see whether we are happy enough to keep working a bit longer for more of a buffer. In my current job, I'm definitely not interested in working longer than I have to, so essentially I'm on the market to see whether I can find more enjoyable work for my final stretch.
The academic job market being what it is, and our finances being what they are, I've sprayed applications pretty broadly - including applications for positions that would require a loss in rank or pay, and applications for contract positions that are much more precarious than my current role. I have paid no attention to the perceived rank of the institution, as long as there is something in the position that looks more interesting /to me/ than my current role... Ironically - maybe because they think I'm not serious - the positions that would involve a "demotion" haven't even given me a second look, while it's looking very likely that I'll end up with an offer from a much higher-tier institution, with higher pay and much better working conditions, in an already-tenured, secure ongoing role... That's great if it happens - but I seriously would have been happy with any of the positions to which I applied, and we had been gearing up for either drop in pay (accompanied by a move to lower cost of living areas) or a "precarious" position that might not outlast our three-year minimum planned working period.
I have been very quiet at my institution about the fact that I'm applying elsewhere, except for my immediate manager, who knows everything, and a friend who is also on the job market. The friend has a complicated history. They had a good, stable, full-time position that they gave up to pursue a PhD (not in a high-demand field). They did receive a scholarship, but it was a significant reduction in pay from what they made before, so they also needed to take on a lot of teaching to make ends meet. I am /sure/ I must have had the "you know it's really hard to get an academic job?" conversation with them, but they are an adult - older than me, in fact - and at base it's their business what they want to do with their life. They are an exceptional teacher, and I have been helping them get both teaching and research assistant work for many years. This year, I also helped their partner get the first job they have had after an extended and confidence-draining period of unemployment.
My friend finished their PhD not too long ago. I set them up with a research fellowship to help them get some more publications (and then ended up helping with the actual publications... my name's on them too, but not proportionately to the work...). Their publication rate is not high enough, in my opinion, to be very competitive. They are very picky about where they will live, and about the kind of position they will take. They are putting in almost no applications - I've applied for twice as many positions in the past six months, and I'm not in any sense desperate for a job. I've discussed my own rejection rate with them, because they seem to be feeling personally insulted by the rejections they have received so far - but I've been rejected by more places than they've even applied to - that's just the nature of the market... I've shared my application materials, so that they can get some ideas about how to approach the market. I've pointed them to resources for improving their application. (To be clear, this was all after they asked for help.) But, at base, they are approaching the market as though they are sort of offended at having to demonstrate why they are worth the hire, and, well... it's a buyer's market... Recently, they applied for a position at my "rank" (which is... not an entry-level position) at our institution, and were expressing great confidence about at least being shortlisted, and then seemed shocked when I gently said that the position might not actually consider applicants straight out of a PhD.
They are genuinely very distressed, and it's distressing for me to see them in this position. Some of the distress is about their very real financial precarity, and the stress from not knowing whether they will have a job in the future. At the same time, from my point of view, they are also not being serious about their finances. They travel overseas every year, for long periods of time - like, multiple months - and this a non-negotiable expense, from their point of view. Again, they are adults. This is their business. I have never offered financial advice, although I have been helping with financial crises for years by helping them get more income through work (and they have never, ever asked for loans or anything that: they do want to earn their own way). But they spend a lot of time offloading their stress onto me, and I then end up spending time scouting out work to help them get out of serial financial jams...
The reason I am posting, though, is that the volume of distress has gotten much greater recently and, along with it, a growing expressed resentment grounded in the perception that, because I have a secure, permanent job, I am much wealthier. Now, I am objectively wealthier (although most of that wealth is still locked in forms that I can't access until retirement), but that's because I save more than half my income... I had been assuming that maybe my salary was genuinely a lot higher, and so I'd been biting my tongue when these sort of resentful comments were made, but my friend recently said something about their taxes that made me realise that their household income must be almost identical to ours - and, given that a decent portion of our income is investment-related, this probably means that our household take-home pay is almost certainly lower than theirs.
I should have worked this out sooner, because I have a rough sense of their incomes from having facilitated jobs for them, but I'd honestly never thought about it, and had sort of taken at face value the declarations about how much easier I had things because of my stable job. But I had never really thought about it, and it's made me sort of retrospectively irritated that I've been swallowing some years of barbed comments about how much easier we have things because I've "made it" in an academic career. I'm sure that things are intensifying because it's now looking likely that I'm going to get this offer from another institution - and this is a sufficient jump in prestige that it's being processed as another "unfair" way that I'm "making it" when they aren't. There's also the basic material issue that the other position is far away, so I obviously won't be in anywhere near the position I have been to help them organise work. I understand the psychology of why my friend might be resentful.
But there is also a growing bit of me that is going, "You have a higher take-home pay and a smaller family: take a couple years off overseas travel or reduce expenses in other ways, and dig yourselves out of this mess..." And I don't want to say that, because, again, their life priorities are not my business. But I don't want to be resented for the benefits from my household's priorities... So I guess this post is about depositing my irritation here, so I don't say something in person about things that are really none of my business... ;-P
