When I was a grad student, I took a class with a professor emeritus who engaged in a time-honored grad school ritual that has fallen somewhat out of favor: he had the entire class over to his house for dinner.

His house was beautiful and spacious, having been bought a good forty years before the tech boom caused housing prices in the area to skyrocket. What I remember most vividly is the library. It filled every room in the house and had its own card cataloging system. My professor had pulled a first edition Kant for us to admire (in silence, over cups of apple juice).

I think often about that dinner, the house, and the first edition Kant. I think about it in the context of how completely out of reach it all seemed, even at the time. In the mid-twentieth century, when this professor was a young man railing against Deconstruction and personally loathing Derrida, it was possible to attain such material comfort through academic and intellectual labor. The “life of the mind” didn’t require much material sacrifice, especially if one had a spouse who didn’t work outside the home. You could write books about German Romanticism and have a beautiful house with a beautiful library.

That lifestyle has evaporated. In 2014–15 (the last time the data seems to have been available), the median income for an assistant professor in the humanities was less than $60,000. The median income for a full professor in the humanities was less than $93,000. Although these numbers are now a decade old, wage increases have not kept pace with post-COVID inflation. And those are the lucky few who are employed fulltime. For both humanities faculty members and music-industry professionals, precarious gig work is much more likely.

Given these economic conditions, it is no wonder that both academics and musicians (not to mention academic musicians) are making pivots toward careers that allow for some measure of stability. And yet, even now, I too often hear rhetoric that smacks of an old, familiar narrative of selling out. It’s been some time since I’ve heard that exact phrase, but I often hear implicit versions of it from graduate students, even as they consider paths beyond the professoriate: “I might go work for a nonprofit but I wouldn’t go work for a bank.”

I do know PhDs who work for banks. I also know many humanists and artists, including more than one trained musicologist, who work in the tech industry. These jobs are often not what they had in mind when they embarked on their academic or artistic careers, but they allow the people in them to live relatively comfortable, economically stable lives.

I worry that the way we talk about careers continues to perpetuate value judgments about what people should and should not do with their degrees. I worry that in talking about “values-driven career exploration” or “meaningful work,” even those of us in the academy who fully support graduate students pursuing a range of careers are actually reproducing a different hierarchy, in which the careers that are most acceptable—those in nonprofits, for example, or education—are still the most economically precarious. I worry that while the language has evolved, the gatekeeping impulse remains the same.

And what do we mean by “values-driven,” anyway? Many of us tend to think in terms of high ideals: working to stop climate change, mitigating economic or racial inequality, creating access to the arts. Those are all fine things to pursue. But there is an inherent classism in valorizing only (poorly paid) nonprofit work, which is an easier and more viable pathway for members of the comfort class, whose lifestyles tend to be subsidized by family money. What if your values include ensuring that you and your family members have health insurance? What if they include taking care of your aging parents? What if they include paying down or preventing the accumulation of medical or credit card debt, or paying off student loans? What if they include saving for retirement or ensuring that your own kids don’t graduate with any educational debt themselves?

What if . . . and hear me out here . . . you just want a really nice life with really nice things?

That doesn’t need to be an enormous house with a full library and a first edition Kant. That might not be your idea of a nice life. But it is okay to want your version of a nice life, and for that to include the material benefits that matter to you. That isn’t selling out. That is just self-care.

I’m not arguing that working for an extractive industry is the same as working for a mission-driven organization. I’m also not arguing that people shouldn’t think about their values when deciding what kind of work to pursue. I am arguing that 1) academia, the artistic world, and the nonprofit sector all engage in their own forms of extraction; and 2) a narrow understanding of which values “count” is a problem.

It is okay for work to be work, and for you to find meaning and self-expression elsewhere: in family, friends, a garden, volunteer work, running, yoga, travel, cooking, creative practice, the arts, political organizing. Work is one component of your life; it is not the only component or even the most important one, though if you’ve been on the artistic or academic track for some time, you can certainly be forgiven for thinking that it is. Economic precarity, and the suffering that comes with it, is not virtuous.

The life of the mind was once a very good life. Remember that when thinking about the type of life you want to have and the work that will enable it.