I know that what I earn doesn’t reflect what I contribute. I know the financial services compensation structure is partly rent extraction. I know that a teacher shaping thirty children’s futures creates more value than most of what happens on a trading floor.
I also have a son, a family to support, and I live in Hong Kong — a city where housing costs are set by finance salaries at the top and borne by everyone. A good school isn’t free. A decent flat isn’t cheap. These aren’t luxuries. They’re the baseline for the life I want my family to have.
There’s a certain kind of person who resolves this tension by pretending it doesn’t exist — earning well and telling themselves they deserve every dollar. There’s another kind who resolves it by opting out — choosing meaning over money and wearing the sacrifice as identity. I respect both, but I don’t think either is fully honest.
The honest position, for me, is holding both at once. The system is unfair. I benefit from it. I’m going to keep benefiting from it because the alternative isn’t noble poverty — it’s my kid in a worse school and my family under financial stress. That’s not a trade I’m willing to make for philosophical consistency.
What I can do is be clear-eyed about it. Not pretend my salary measures my worth. Not confuse market success with moral achievement. Not mistake “I earned this” for “I deserve this.” These are small distinctions, but they matter — they’re the difference between someone who operates within a system and someone who’s been captured by it.
I work in AI. I enjoy it. The work is genuinely useful — not in a “changing the world” way, but in a concrete way that makes real systems work better. I’m getting better at it. It supports my family. That’s not settling. It’s a good life.
The philosophical questions don’t go away — they just stop being paralysing once you accept that you don’t need to resolve them before living. You can examine the system and still operate within it. You can see the game clearly and still play it well. The alternative — waiting for a perfectly fair game before you start — isn’t wisdom. It’s just another way of not showing up.