Seeing Poverty Abroad Changed My Perspective On My Career

A huge roasted pig sprawled across the table with an apple in its smiling mouth, frozen in mockery at my naïveté. I was 6-years-old at the time, feeling mesmerized and terrified all at once. The other kids eagerly grabbed slices and chatted in Tagalog. I could only stare.

Years passed before I ate pork again. Conceptually, I knew where meat came from. But some part of me always imagined this happy field where already-cooked meat sprouted up like the dandelions and sunflowers around them.

The pork, also called lechon, is a beloved luxury meal in the region, and emblematic of a humble life where people make do with what they have. Despite my discomfort, there was a communal joy to the occasion I never forgot. But that was only the beginning of the things I learned.

How we ended up there

We were stationed in the Philippines for my dad’s Navy career. On our first night, a huge typhoon plowed into the country. We only had a few hours to prepare.

Just as the air got still, cool and dark, fireflies floated up in my bedroom window, dancing for me like tiny winged ballerinas.

I heard the loud hooting calls of monkeys echoing across the jungle. Eventually, the storm came and rain blew sideways all night. Despite the chaos, we took it much better than other Westerners in our area. My family is from the southeast coast of Florida, and we’d been through more than a few monster storms. This was just another day at the office. Sadly, many locals lost their homes that night.

This is the nature of living in these regions. The Philippines is much like a tropical island, with its towns and cities peppered across steep jungle mountains that seemed perpetually adjacent to white sanded beaches.

We often drove to a local Philippine town to see my friend, Marcos. He was my age and a fellow classmate. I was wide-eyed as we traveled “off base” and saw the stark contrast to the world I’d come from. Large families shared small huts, often without running water or air conditioning. For many kids, working in the blistering fields wasn’t an option, but an inevitability. And this isn’t to say all Filipinos are sad. It’s quite the opposite.

We entered the bustling and impoverished urban sprawl where Marcos’s house was a two-room home on a second floor, lifted up on thick wooden poles to help avoid flooding which routinely swept through the city. It contained only a kitchen and small bedroom he shared with his mother and two brothers. He owned only three toys. I was reminded of my own box that overflowed with a hundred action figures. The contrast wasn’t lost to me.

Normal days out in the sun

Our school bus driver wore Terminator sunglasses and blasted Philippine folk music, which sounded a bit like mariachi songs.

When he dropped us off at home, there was always half a dozen Filipino maids waiting with umbrellas to escort us. These maids often lived with military families (including our own), and were paid $50-$100 a month — and were thrilled with it.

The umbrellas were an accessory unrelated to rain: Colorism was, and still is, a big thing in the Philippines and many Asiatic countries, hence why many of them avoided getting sunburned. It would be many years until I connected these dots.

My father was a SEAL, and working with Filipino SEAL teams at the time. My mom thought it’d be fun to organize a group bus outing one Saturday, and so we invited a bunch of men from Dad’s platoon out. In theory, we thought this would be a family outing. But as each young SEAL got on the bus, it was clear they’d brought a prostitute companion with them for the day. I sat in the back, as they marveled at my white and blonde hair (which was a novelty in Asia at the time).

My mother fumed — mostly in anger at the men. The working women were harmless and nice. The culture was quite different in the 1980s. Prostitution, though illegal, was and — mostly still is — an accepted and common thing. Often, a father ran a brothel-bar and his own daughters would be among the employees.

One thing was clear: For locals, everything was about survival and getting by. At every turn in a developing country, you see so many stories playing out, so many stark reminders of the humble struggle some go through.

Reflecting bad during harder times

Decades later, I sat in a cubicle, working hard to further my finance career. Each year was a grind to get to the next performance review, the next promotion or raise. I was perpetually stressed out of my mind. I had nightmare’s about my KPIs. I’d see the numbers in red, on a giant stadium screen for all the company to see and wake up in sweats.

I sometimes recalled my days in the Philippines, where things were so simple and I saw so much difficulty and struggle playing out in front of me.

Marcos, and the many faces I came to know, lived such despairing lives where so much was absent. I remembered the sunburned farmers’ faces, which were worn and fatigued from working the rice paddies all day. Would they have been infuriated with my audacity to be unhappy? To resent making, what they would consider, a killer salary?

There have been many studies on income’s relation to happiness. A famous 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman, suggested you stopped gaining happiness after reaching $60K-$90K in annual salary (which is subject to some obvious variables such as what you do and where you live).

Per another researcher, Dr. Killingsworth, “For very poor people, money clearly helps a lot. But if you have a decent income and you’re still miserable, the source of your misery probably isn’t something money can fix.”

Whether you toil in a field behind oxen or sit behind a keyboard collecting huge paychecks, you are still subject to heartbreak, grief, disappointments, depression and — a good ol’ bad attitude. Some demons can’t be bought out.

The poor farmer who is a great father, and has good friendships, and who takes care of himself, is going to be happier and healthier than the overweight billionaire who is in his toxic third marriage.

As a financial analyst, I went through a cycle of realization. I was blind to my own happiness and what constituted my ideal life. I saw everything through the prism of money, and saw it only in relation to making more or less of it. My whole life was about not making mistakes and hitting new goals. I’d forgotten myself.

But I saw my future playing out in front of me. Several senior executives worked long, long hours each week, their hairlines shrinking and turning grey by the day. Several marriages imploded alongside these stressors. Was their life really any better than the humblest lives I saw living abroad? I suspect you’d see a few more grateful and happy people living in those small huts compared to these guys.

The age old dilemma of things and happiness

The money-happiness research reveals that the exception for below-norm salary happiness comes from those who draw special, non-monetary value from their career.

I eventually quit finance to write and am quite happy with this life — 4 years out. No, my lifetime earnings won’t be more than what Finance Sean would have made — but I am living on my own terms. I have the opportunity to be creative and express myself, which I value greatly.

Above all, this change is an expression of choosing one’s own destiny. This is a blessing many of us ignore, and don’t even realize as an option. So I turn to you and wish you happiness as well. If you do not have it, perhaps consider your money-passion tradeoffs.

As I have learned the hard way, money represents just a small fraction of the overall picture of contentment. It’s exciting when it’s new, abundant and useful. But it’s not a unicorn that can whisk away all your problems.

Sometimes, a more humble life will better serve you.