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Most of my friends in the arts and all of my friends with phds come from generational wealth. Of course that exists in big law, but I would say big law is a mixed bag of people who come from wealth and know it’s a sure shot at continuing that and people who are first gen, have grit and are willing to sacrifice work/life balance for a shot at climbing the wealth ladder.
Enthusiast
Of course - a high income creates the POSSIBILITY of building some assets (and being wealthy means having highly valuable assets, so in that sense it can put you on the path) but that takes discipline and effort, on top of actually earning the money. So for most people their high income primarily serves to inflate lifestyle (which is understandable, and can be a quite comfortable way to serve those who are actually truly wealthy).
Coach
I don’t think it’s a personality trait. It’s a set of circumstances.
Biglaw attracts people who are looking for a job that gives you a high likelihood of achieving an upper middle class life doing the kind of work that parents who didn’t have access to the same kind of high-level white collar work are proud of.
People who grew up with enough consistent security to design and execute an entire life and educational path to allow them to enter into ‘caring’ or ‘creative’ professions grew up differently than I did. Personally, I take issue with people who had that kind of privilege turning their nose up at what I do like i have a character flaw or a ‘personality trait’ that makes me a bad person.
I had food stamps and church charity Christmas presents growing up. I missed school a lot before I could drive because I couldn’t get my mom to wake up to drive me there even if I stood next to her bed and screamed and shook her for hours. I didn’t understand how financial aid worked or that you could negotiate scholarships, so I turned down ivy undergrads for the first school that offered me a full ride with room and board covered. I worked my ass off my entire life to make enough money as a grown-up to be safe. Literally just safe. I didn’t even know how much money that took, but I figured a job people said made you were rich must be enough, and the smartest, richest kids I knew in high school seemed to think being a lawyer would be an acceptable thing to do.
My friends with trust funds who work in nonprofit management or the arts think of themselves as real working class heroes because their apartments are pre-war or because they “pay their own way” instead of drawing from the trust for day to day expenses. They never think about the fact that they didn’t take out loans for school, that their kids won’t have to, and that they’ll never have to save for retirement. These friends don’t have better personality traits. They have generations of psychological and physical safety that allow them to make more pleasant choices.
Well, that’s very odd that your friends in caring professions are all privileged. That isn’t my experience at all, and I have many friends who are PDs, nurses, teachers, journalists etc
I’ll give some of mine: grew up in poverty after coming to the US as a refugee at age 4, can’t turn my head off, interested in being around other smart people, not enough spoons to be in a “caring” job (tried it and burned out emotionally much worse than biglaw).
Don’t put that stuff up on a pedestal, man. Dermatologists are not less money driven than big law lawyers.
I worked at a national public interest org in law school and it was… far too focused on donors and optics and organizationally was a hot mess. It wasn’t as pure as people think and I knew I had no interest in working for one after law school.
Yeah and I've never met a doctor who is just in it for the money
Anesthesiologists make a lot of money and are generally cretinous with terrible bedside manner of course
Mentor
I’m in big law for the money and the actual work and coworkers - intelligent people and work that is hard enough to be challenging but not so hard it’s not something I can do. (See eg really advanced physics…)
I grew up very much middle class. We didn’t take fancy vacations but we went camping and saw relatives. We were frugal and careful but never really wanting. I didn’t have to take on any debt for college, in great part due to their frugality during my childhood and good financial aid.
I spent two years between college and law school working low paying jobs, with support from my parents for car insurance and emergencies, knowing my life was still very privileged but realizing how stressful it was even with a basic safety net to make under 30k a year (and at one point more like 23k) in a HCOL area. (This was in the mid-2000s.)
I went to law school and my mind was blown. There was a world where people bought plane tickets at the last minute, didn’t have to rely on someone paying them back 20 dollars to meet their budget for the week, could order food at a sit down restaurant in an airport (no joke this seemed like such a luxury to me), could afford to spend 100 dollars on shoes… could pay someone to just blow dry their hair? I’m not trying to say any of this is necessary but it sure was seductive. And it turned out the kind of law I wanted to do was primarily at these big firms with these crazy starting salaries of 125k!!
And… scene.
I don’t pretend I’m a savior of the world. I donate a lot of money, I help my sister a lot with expenses who does do public service work in a HCOL area, I do a lot of pro bono. But I know who I am and what my job is. But I ultimately like having enough money to not have to be worried about it at a serious level.
Mentor
Of course.
Narcissism mixed with insecurity.
ETA: in all seriousness, the people who "choose" to go into biglaw for the money are most likely the people that need the money so they don't actually have the luxury of choosing to do something for less money.
Do you really think PI attorneys are motivated by altruism and not money?
Student loans
Enthusiast
I think they may be more likely to be in denial that money matters (irrespective of whether it should). In a society like the U.S., where practically everything costs money (including health care and education), every dollar is an added degree of freedom: it puts more options on the table.
Debilitating risk aversion