My Class And Goals

I just went to my mom’s funeral, and so was reminded about my family, and of the question of what exactly one wants to do with one’s life.

For money, my dad was a programmer, and my mom made presentation graphics for a finance firm. On the side they were missionaries, a pastor, and a writer. When she could retire from making money, my mom became a writer full-time, contributing to 30 of the 275 Chicken Soup books; ~20M people have probably read one of her essays there.

My two bothers were most recently a court bailiff and a pool cleaner for money, and on the side a musician and pastor. Their wives were a sales clerk and a legal secretary. My wife was a clinical social worker and her brother was a govt lawyer. ChatGPT (5.4) and Claude (4.7) estimate ~45-55, 50-60 as percentile ranks for this family overall in terms of job prestige.

I’m now a university professor, and my two sons are a programmer and an investment banker, so the three of us together get ~75,90 percentile estimates. Making my family solidly middle class, and me and my sons upper middle.

Workers often face a conflict between how their job has been define by the world and their training, and what their managers tell them to do on that job. Usually people succeed more when they accept boss framings, and higher class folks more tend to have this and other more successful habits.

Both LLMs say that this also happens more specifically in academia, where there’s a conflict between the job defined as intellectual process, i.e., helping the world better understand key abstract topics, and the job defined as what it takes to get prestige and resources. Lower class folks tend more to pursue that first definition. My class background is substantially lower than that of most academics, and I fit this pattern, as I see my job more in terms of intellectual progress, less in terms of resources and prestige.

At my mom’s funeral, I was reminded that such events involve much praising of the dead on various metrics. Which raises the question: what do you aspire to be praised on at your funeral, and in future historical mentions? It also a meta question: why don’t we write periodic essays on what we are trying to achieve in our lives, so that at our funerals folks can discuss how well we achieved our stated goals? Yes of course they could also discuss how well we achieved their other goals for us, but our own goals also seem quite relevant.

I would of course prefer that, at my death and after, and even well before, people praise me for all the usual virtues. But compared to others, I put a much bigger weight on intellectual progress. I want people to say, because it’s true, that I helped the world gain insight on important neglected potent topics. Important because that’s what matters, neglected because it is far easier to find big insights on those topics, and potent because the big win is when others build on my insights, and integrate them into larger shared systems, as part of a long process of civilization accumulating insight. And myself having insights isn’t that valuable compared to communicating them in ways so let others see and build on them.

At my funeral, please do ask yourselves how well I did at this.