A sentence, often meant to comfort someone feeling like an imposter, goes something like: “think about everything that went into you being able to do what you do.” It encompasses the duration of your academic pursuits, the financial burden of student debt, periods of unpaid experience, the cost of educational materials, the development of transferable skills, how you’ve adapted your communication for workplace interactions, and the gradual, often challenging, process of becoming a viable candidate and earning a living in your chosen industry.

The implied conclusion is meant to be comforting: if it cost a lot to make you, then it makes sense that you cost a lot now, and I understand why people say it. The intense pressures of education and the job market can lead to genuine burnout, and occupations that are more draining than fulfilling contribute to a significant weariness. This reflects a fundamental human need to avoid the sensation that life has been quietly devoured by a relentless, impersonal force.

But that reassurance has always left me feeling uneasy. It’s not because I believe learning has no value or that people don’t deserve ease, but the underlying logic that unsettles me is the move from “it took a lot to become me” to “therefore I deserve a lot, perhaps more than others, perhaps far more.” It turns a personal history into a ledger, and that ledger into a moral argument.

It reminds me of a talk I watched years ago, one of those “know your worth” speeches that boiled down to a single mantra: “Fuck you, pay me.” It wasn’t in the spirit of collective bargaining or a refusal of exploitation, but in the sense of welding your price to your identity.

So I went looking for a concept that could help me name what felt off and I thought of socially necessary labour time. It measures value by the social average—the typical time it takes, under normal conditions, with normal tools and normal skills, to produce something. And it made me wonder: what happens if we apply a similar shift in perspective to the other side of the wage argument—not to the time it takes to produce things, but to the costs people claim justify their pay?

Let’s call that socially necessary living expenses.

At its most basic, this means the costs required for a person to live, recover, and participate normally in society. Not a fantasised “bare survival” line, but something socially real: housing, food, transport, healthcare, some leisure, communication—basically, the ability to show up to life without being in constant crisis mode. What counts as “necessary” changes historically, of course. Having internet access today isn’t the same category as having it in 1996, for example.

So far, this is fairly straightforward. Most of us can intuitively feel the difference between needing stable housing to function and preferring a house that signals a certain status. But some of the most aggressive justifications for high incomes reclassify status consumption as a necessity. The common perception is one of cold, hard reality: proximity to the right people is a job requirement; the right presentation is necessary for credibility; the right school is a gateway to specific opportunities; and being in the right rooms is essential for network maintenance. In other words, you “need” the expensive suburb, private school, elite university, club membership, professional wardrobe, constant travel, and the right tastes and forms of leisure.

Then the salary arrives as the natural, almost logical consequence: “I’m not greedy—these are just the costs of doing business.”

This is where I get uncomfortable because they switched out a big piece of the argument, and no one even noticed. This isn’t really about how much it costs to do the job—it’s the cost of remaining legible as a member of the class that gets offered the work in the first place. These aren’t living expenses, but entry fees.

But education is expensive, you might say. And yes, that’s the problem. It is dangerously easy to construct a story about your own salary that feels like justice. You can always compile a ledger of sacrifices: the tuition, lost years, stress, therapy, rent paid in a city you didn’t choose because that’s where the jobs are, and the silent tax of “keeping up” with professional norms. And if you’re not careful, you begin to treat that ledger as a moral claim on the world.

The real problem here is the implied model of fairness it smuggles in: “I paid a lot to become employable in this system, therefore the system owes me a lot—regardless of what my work actually contributes to society or what others need to live.” This model fosters a privatised ethics, where my income is justified if it matches my personal investment, not if it matches any broader social need or contribution. It’s a shift from asking “What does society require?” to insisting “Look what it cost me to get here.”

The great irony is that education being prohibitively expensive is not a natural fact, but a political arrangement. Credentialing being an exclusionary gauntlet is not a law of physics, but an institutional choice. So when someone says, “High pay is justified because becoming me was expensive,” what I often hear is “society should reimburse me for surviving a set of barriers that society itself chose to erect.”

This is the core of the circular logic: credentials and networks gate certain jobs. Those credentials and networks demand significant money, time, and cultural fluency. The people who pass through the gate then name those costs “necessary.” Their subsequent pay funds the same gate-cost for the next generation—their children, their protégés, their circle. The gate stays expensive, and its very exclusivity is offered as evidence of the merit it filters for. This is a self-maintaining ecosystem, a kind of social perpetual motion machine where inequality fuels its own justification.

This is where the idea of socially necessary living expenses becomes useful as critique. It allows us to ask a clarifying question: Necessary for what, exactly? Necessary to competently write code, manage a team, run a hospital, argue a case? Or necessary to remain inside the exclusive circuit where such jobs and the power attached to them circulate? Because those are fundamentally different kinds of necessity.

A society might genuinely decide that certain kinds of difficult, skilled work deserve high compensation, but that is not what is happening when “necessary expenses” are primarily positional goods. If the expense is valuable because it excludes, then calling it “necessary” is less of a justification and more of a confession.

Networking and so-called elite education are protectionism with excellent branding. A significant portion of what is sold as elite education is not primarily about the transmission of knowledge. You can learn an enormous amount from public universities, libraries, the internet, apprenticeships, and the simple act of doing the work. What elite institutions sell is brand-name validation, access to a peer group that will become tomorrow’s gatekeepers, curated internships, a certain polish, and a direct pipeline into high-status professions. This is why the defense “I paid a lot for this education” misses the point. The education is expensive precisely because it functions as a social sorting mechanism which concentrates pre-existing advantage, then markets that concentration as excellence.

If you accept that arrangement uncritically, then high salaries look like a fair return on “human capital.” But if you interrogate the arrangement, those same salaries start to look like income derived not from creation but from controlling access to a bottleneck. The moral aura around “investment” then changes entirely. It ceases to be “I invested in myself, now pay me back,” and becomes “I purchased access to a protected lane, and now I require that the lane remain profitable.”

This is also a story about anxiety, as a world where housing is terrifying, retirement is a risky solo venture, and healthcare is a financial precipice makes it dangerously easy to think your salary needs to fund not only your needs but also your future security, your family’s future security, and your social standing. When the ground feels perpetually unstable, people will reach for any narrative that makes their footing seem solid. We lose sight of the difference between needing security and desiring victory, between protecting one’s children and elevating them above others, and between seeking just compensation and making personal lifestyle preferences an unchangeable business necessity.

Using the lens of socially necessary living expenses as critique doesn’t require moral grandstanding or assuming bad faith. It simply requires that we stop conflating exclusion with necessity and say clearly that a lot of high pay is not compensation for difficulty but funding for class membership. It lets us see that many professional “requirements” are less about competence and more about gatekeeping and allows us to recognise that much “human capital” discourse is not neutral economics but a story designed to convert privilege and positional advantage into the appearance of deserved, earned income.

It also lets me say something that feels closer to the bone: my own biography does not automatically create a moral claim to outpace other people’s ability to simply live. That doesn’t mean accepting exploitation or shrinking my own sense of worth, but that I don’t want my self-respect to be forever hitched to the size of a number, or to depend on turning my past into an invoice I present to the world.

In the end, I keep circling back to a different question than what it cost to become me. The question I find more interesting is: What would it cost—socially, collectively—to make a decent life normal?

If the concept of socially necessary labour time helps demystify where value comes from, then the idea of socially necessary living expenses might help demystify where compensation goes. It helps us separate what people genuinely need to live and participate with dignity from what they feel they need to maintain a position in a hierarchy. Once you make that separation, a great deal of our modern salary folklore begins to look less like hard-nosed economics and more like a kind of theology—a story we tell to make inequality feel inevitable, even natural.