Different people have different ways of measuring success (their own and other’s). There are goals and objectives which aren’t necessarily important in their own right, but are a way of keeping score in the game of life. One of the most popular ways of keeping score is earned income. Our society tends to have a slightly schizophrenic attitude to wealth generation. On the one hand we insist that “money isn’t everything” and “the best things in life are free”, on the other hand our entire society is geared towards making money.

So lets just be honest, wealth is very important. It is one of the most important things in life. It is essential for life. If you don’t have some form of wealth (at least a charitable hand-out) you don’t eat and you die. (Here I’m defining wealth broadly to include all material possessions, so even owning a bowl of rice that’s just been given to you is wealth.) Wealth is one those few things in life, where a bare minimum is necessary for survival and, in general, the more you have, the better off you are.

Of course it’s not the only thing that’s like this. Happiness is another. Without at least some happiness in your life you are very likely to commit suicide. So a bare minimum is necessary and the more you have the better off you are. But you can’t say that happiness is more important than money, this is meaningless. It’s like saying that water is more important than food. Fundamentally the absence of either one will kill you; and which is more important depends entirely on whether you are hungry or thirsty.

However, earned income has an importance to many people that goes beyond it’s value as wealth. To illustrate this consider two people: one who is out of work and getting dole payments, the other is working hard but only earning the same amount. Many would argue that the worker is more “successful” than the person on dole (not everyone would, because some people keep score differently). Many people are more proud, and value more highly, a pay check than a dole check, even if the amounts are the same.

So income is a way of keeping score. You can set goals by it (”I will be earning $70K by the time I am 30″) and you can compare yourself to those around you (”I am the highest paid person my age that I know”). I don’t think this is overly materialistic, I think it’s mostly about striving, about wanting to live a life of achievement. There is nothing wrong with this and it seems likely that 90%, perhaps even 99% of people in our society measure themselves in this way to some extent.

I say “to some extent” because life is a complicated game and just about everybody has multiple ways of keeping score. Anyone who only keeps score with income probably is being overly materialistic, but I’ve never met anyone actually like this. Other score keeping methods include your children’s school grades and the number of people at parties you throw. Like these, there’s nothing inherently wrong with earned income as a score, it only goes bad when you neglect other important aspects of life in order to keep the score up. It has to be remembered that it is not the only score. Another problem is remembering that it is only a score. A paycut because of poor economic times does not mean that a person is not working hard, or is any less successful.

I say all this all this because income is not the way I keep score. I really don’t care about my income other that the wealth it represents. I care about that only because of the things I can use that wealth for (a good book, a nice meal out, etc). But when I say this many people get defensive. I think because of our society’s schizophrenic attitude to money. To not value wealth is seen as somehow morally or spiritually superior, so people who do value wealth (which is most people) sometimes feel threatened by a person who doesn’t.

I am not in any way superior for not valuing income, I’m just unusual. I have my own ways of keeping score. My primary one is probably publication. My goals are about writting stuff that is good enough to be worth reading and my way of measuring this is how often I can get published. At the moment the score is pretty darn low, but I’m working on it and I have time.

The score keeping methods I’ve mentioned so far, are probably equally good. They all suffer from the problem of not necessarily reflecting success accurately (incomes are dependant on the times, publishers can be unfair, school grades can be unfair, and a bad storm can discourage guests) and the problem of only measuring one aspect of you life. As long as a person keeps in mind all that is really important to them, these are a good rough yardstick.

There are bad scores out there that are self-destructive. For example, “how many kilos can I lose” is a potentially fatal score keeping method (this is different from the method of “how close can I keep to my medically ideal weight” which is not a problem at all). Not to mention ones that hurt others such as “how many people can I make cry today” (many bosses seem to measure themselves on this one, I’m not kidding).

So I guess what I’m saying is that people should not be embarressed or feel bad about being proud of their earnings. I think many western societies (and perhaps others) have an unhealthy attitude to money, but I don’t think the answer is to deny the importance of wealth. Lets just be open about this: wealth is extremely important and the amount you have (while not a perfect or the only measure of success) is something to be proud of, or something to work on improving. Greed isn’t good, but that doesn’t mean money is bad.