I Used to Envy the Wrong People

A couple of months ago I had dinner with Ilan, who runs a company worth about a billion dollars, and I came home from it feeling small. I kept wondering about what I’d done with my life.

Then we had two dinners last month that shouldn’t have had anything to do with each other.

The first was with Ben and Laura. Ben wrote a book a few years ago that a lot of people read, the kind of book that gets him invited to things, and now he’s writing the next one. Laura runs a foundation. We ate at their place, and their kids came down to say hello and went back up, and everything about the evening was warm. They’re good parents, they’re good at what they do, and I’ve admired them for a long time.

But somewhere around the second bottle of wine the conversation turned to work, and it stayed there. Ben talked about the new book, which is three years in and probably a year from done. He said most of it is drudgery, the kind you do at six in the morning because there’s no other time, and that he gets one of these out every three or four years, so this one has to work. He’d had lunch that week with someone whose name I recognized, and the lunch was about the book, and the lunch before that had also been about the book. Laura talked about her board. Neither of them complained. Every subject just came back to the next thing, and the next thing had to be at least as big as the last thing, and the last thing had been very big. At one point Ben said something like “you’re only as good as whatever you’re working on,” and he said it with a sigh.

The second dinner was a few nights later, with Dave and Karen. Dave was a lawyer at a big firm for fifteen years and now works at a legal clinic downtown where most of the clients don’t have an address. Karen is a doctor who had a private practice with a wealthy clientele who could pay whatever she wanted to charge. Now she’s the nurse at a public middle school. We went to a place near them with paper napkins and good fried chicken.

Dave told a story about a client he’d been working with for two years who had finally gotten into housing, and how the man had come by the clinic the next week without an appointment, just to tell him. Karen told us about a kid who kept turning up in her office with stomachaches that weren’t stomachaches, and how she’d spent the fall figuring out what they were.

A few days later, Abigail and I were walking through the park. I told her about the dinner with Ilan, and that I really like my job but I feel like sometimes I want to do more. I wasn’t sure what I meant by more. A bigger thing, probably. A thing with my name on it.

She was quiet for a second, and then she said, “You could do that and I’d support you. But do you want to be more like Dave and Karen, or more like Ben and Laura?”

“Dave and Karen,” I said. She said, “Me too.”

Names and details have been changed.