If there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s the idea that people who are poor aren’t hard workers. Worse, I get steamed when people who are wealthy proudly thump their chests and state their wealth is due to hard work.

Um, no. I mean, it is, in part. I do believe that plenty of folks who make a lot of money work “hard” (by which I assume we all agree means “putting in a ton of hours and really sweating over the task at hand.”) But that’s not the point.

I’m in a kind of unique posi­tion here in that less than a year ago, I earned a 6-figure salary in a secure gov­ern­ment job. I am now a full-time artist (and part time mil­i­tary reservist) with an income hov­ering just above the poverty line.

And here’s the thing: I work … maybe 3–4 times as “hard” as I did when I was wealthy.

The issue isn’t hard work. The issue is mon­e­ti­za­tion of that work. I won’t even make the moral judg­ment of society valuing or not valuing the things that I do. I believe that society feels that mil­i­tary ser­vice (par­tic­u­larly domestic first respon­ders like the Coast Guard) are incred­ibly valu­able. I also believe that society feels that the arts are valu­able (and a few artists are richly rewarded).

Why some work is mon­e­tized well and why some isn’t is an *enor­mously* com­pli­cated ques­tion, and is some­thing very smart people could take years to doc­u­ment, and then you know other smart people would come along and debunk the old the­o­ries and pro­pose new ones.

Well, I’m not all that smart, but I do know this: I spend hours upon hours writing, brain­storming, mar­keting my writing, inter­acting with fans, doing sign­ings and on and on and on. The ratio of work to my old office job is at least 3:1. And everyone in the mil­i­tary knows that we work count­less unpaid hours, which, were we in equiv­a­lent pri­vate sector jobs (and even some public sector ones, cops make over­time, as do many civil ser­vants), would have us rich on time-and-a-half hours.

In both cases, I’m glad to do it. I *love* being a writer and I *love* being in the guard. Beyond enough money to feed, clothe and shelter myself (not there yet), this is really all I need.

But when I hear someone in a well-monetized career equate hard-work and riches, it bends me out of shape a little. Because it implies that the firemen, teachers, taxi-drivers, poets, NGO workers, Autism researchers and everyone else who are breaking their backs for sur­vival wages are barely keeping their heads above water simply because they aren’t working hard enough.

And that’s just not the case.