And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids with a love of learning are lifelong learners (essential for workplace success today), but truly, who wants an unemployed Ph.D candidate? You don't want a lawyer who can't get a job because of poor social skills, you don't want a kid with  perfect SAT scores who marries for money because supporting oneself seems too hard. Every parent wants to raise a kid who is capable of supporting himself and capable of finding engaging work for a stable life.

Here's how schooling affects earning power.

1. Focus on pre-K through third grade. 
Why focus on pre-K? There is very solid data that the earning power of kids who attend a pre-K program is so much higher than kids who don’t that Head Start is one of the most sacred of all publicly funded programs in the US.  So the school impact on one’s earning potential starts in pre-K.

Why third grade? Research from Project STAR shows that after third grade, the quality of one’s classroom has little impact on one’s future earning potential.  There is clear data (spanning 25 years and researchers at six universities) that shows that test scores after third grade are not indicators of future earning potential.

2. Ignore standardized test results, obsess over self-confidence levels.
This means, of course, that it doesn’t matter how one performs on national standardized tests since those test scores do not have impact on the sixty years one spends in the workforce.

And this conclusion is consistent with one of my favorite studies in the whole world: It is from Alan Kreuger, professor at Princeton, that shows that while it is true that kids who go to Harvard and Princeton have advantages over others when it comes to future earning, you can get those same advantages just by applying to those schools. It’s having ambition and believing in yourself that are the real harbingers of success. The fancy diploma is a red herring.

3. Teach kids to find mentors.
Faye Crosby, professor at the University of Santa Cruz says that the two most important factors in a person’s earning potential are quality of schooling and quality of mentoring. Now we know that the schooling part of this equation is up to third grade. So maybe, starting in fourth grade, we should be teaching our kids how to get the best mentors.

Let’s consider what life would look like if you took all fourth graders out of school and started teaching them how to get mentors. First of all, the act of finding a mentor is very consistent with what current research on education reform says that kids should be doing: Following the paths that interest them and finding someone to guide them.

4. The best schooling after third grade is unschooling.
Here is a fascinating article from Psychology Today about why school reform will not work because schools are so incredibly ill-suited for teaching kids. In fact, the formula for school—telling kids what they should learn and how they should learn—is a method only for killing their creativity.

Lisa Neilsen, who manages teacher training for New York City public schools, also comes down hard on the classroom structure. She tells parents that kids should learn in a project-based program where the lesson plans are dictated by a child’s current interests. Neilsen says that if the school won’t do that for your kid, take your kid out of school.

5. Aim for out of the box. Way out of the box. That's when things will look right.
So let’s say you take the advice of people whose job is to study what is the best way to teach your kid. Let’s say you take the advice of the reams of research about what factors influence a child’s future earning potential.

What you are left with is waking up every day, asking your child what he or she wants to do, and then finding someone to help them, if you are are not the right person. Some days you will offer up some ideas, some days your kid will say no to everything and decide to play video games.

Here’s what I’m doing to increase my fourth-grader’s earning potential: Pottery.

He told me he wanted to do clay. He said he’s upset that each year of school he got to do a clay project, and this year, since we’re homeschooling, he’s going to miss it.

So I did a little Googling, and I found a pottery studio: Bethel Horizons. (It is Christian, of course. Everything in rural America that has funding is either government or Christian.)

The minute I walked into the studio, I knew we were so lucky. Krista is the pottery teacher, and she took incredible care to make sure each step was a way to focus mentally and "connect with the clay."

She showed him how to use machines and tools and she showed him that part of the process is keeping the workspace neat and clean so the brain and the hands can work in peace.

Then Krista told my son he'd make a pot each time he sits at the wheel. I thought about the study about pottery in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Students who were asked to make one, great pot, learned much slower than kids who made a terrible pot each time at the wheel. Greatness comes from lots of terribleness, so I liked that we were on that path.

I coach so many people who want advice about their career, but so often, these people really just need to learn how to figure out what they want:  experiment, find what might be fun. Try it for a bit. People need coaching on how to take risks and not worry if they fail. People need coaching on how to find a mentor who is invested in their particular path. I see that all these things are related to earning power, and all these things are what kids learn when they direct their own curriculum.

So, my son probably will not grow up to make expensive pots to sell. But I know that while he's skipping school and managing his pottery-learning himself, his earning power is going up, and it's a joy to watch.

This is probably where the drama should be: The Farmer is essentially starting a new business. I have always thought he would do a great job on his own and it's been fun to watch him.

He is experimenting, trying to figure out what he wants. This summer, for example, he let the pigs graze in our field of sweet corn after the season was done.

It's hard for me to understand how revolutionary this is. Knowing very little about pigs or sweet corn, it seems logical to me that the pigs are next to the field, so why not let them eat what they want? But the Farmer keeps telling me that other farmers would think he's crazy.

Then I think, "What? More crazy than you living out here with me and the kids?"

The Farmer will earn less money farming his smaller farm instead of combining it with his parents' farm. But it's a no-brainer. The pay cut is a small price to pay to get emotional independence.

To me and the Farmer it's obvious that he's making a good move for himself. Yet I see lots of other people in this situation: start over and take a pay cut or keep finances stable. The majority of people choose stability, even thought they shouldn't.

So this post is about when it's okay to take a pay cut.

If you want to change careers. Look, you are stopping doing something that you know how to do, and you are going to start doing something you have not done before. Why would you think you will not take a pay cut? Don't be a brat. Take the cut.

If you are over 40 years old. Pay peaks about age 40 for everyone except surgeons and lawyers. So if you are 40 and job hunting, take a pay cut. It's not going to kill you, but holding out for a raise might lead to fears of starvation.

If you have been unemployed for six months. Statistically speaking, you will have to take a pay cut to re-enter the workforce. So instead of holding out to be a superhero of job hunts, just take a job. So much of our self-worth comes from working that ditching unemployment far outweighs avoiding a pay cut.

If you're relocating back to family. Research from Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London shows that to make up for the decrease in happiness that you experience when you leave family and friends, you would need to make $133,000 more than you were earning before the relocation. So it stands to reason that you can take a substantial pay cut to move closer to family and still gain a net happiness benefit because close relationships are so important to one's happiness.

If you will get a great boss. When it comes to the job hunt, getting a boss who will be a great mentor matters more than the job you'll be doing for that boss. The number-one factor that determines your earning power is your schooling. The number-two factor is the quality of mentoring you get. Since most of you are out of school, mentoring should be your number-one concern, and you'll more than make up for a pay cut by gaining a good mentor.

If you are having mental health problems from not working. Work provides a lot of things:  a sense of belonging, sense of purpose, structure and balance to a day, as well as financial security. You can get all these things by short-circuiting your job hunt and taking a lower-paying job. Wondering if you are having problems big enough to qualify for this one? Are you gaining weight during unemployment? That's a sign that you're masking new emotional problems. Get a job.

If you need better insurance. Taking a pay cut to get better insurance is like buying peace of mind. And at a bargain rate, really. If all you need to do is take a pay cut to know that you will not go bankrupt from medical bills (the most common cause of bankruptcy, by the way) then it's worth it. Also, I often contemplate becoming a customer service rep at Microsoft so I can get to their amazing health coverage for kids with Autism. (Asperger's is genetic, and Microsoft knows their employee pool, you've gotta give them that.)

Okay. Look. Can you tell by now that a pay cut is always fine? Really, the only exception would be when you have a job you love. Because we are all looking for a career that provides stability, engagement and a way to support us financially, and often that comes in the form of a pay cut.

You are not your salary. You are not worth less in the world because you are paid less in your job. Get your self-worth from a wide range of things and a pay cut won't matter to you. Focus on the components of a good job: learning, personal growth, friends at work, and a good family life. All those things are worth a lot more than a pay cut.

I must also admit that I ended up in a mental ward. Maybe from postpartum depression, but probably from the stress of being the sole breadwinner and a stay-at-home mom.

I am having flashbacks. Because I'm homeschooling now – both boys. I never really believed I’d do this. When I launched my homeschooling blog I actually thought I was just exploring a trend. I thought I’d just write a little about how it’s clear to me that there is about to be a homeschooling revolution.

But that’s not what happened.

Because then I noticed how the US school system is really just the biggest babysitting institution in the world. My first clue, probably, was that I was dying to have my kids back in school so I could have my life back. What else can I do to get time alone? How else can I do some work? Work is very fun.

I love work. I love how people tell me how great I am when I am right. I love when I sell something and make a lot of money, when I create a great job for someone, when I give great career advice. Work is so rewarding. I get accolades and I get money. It’s a toxic combination.

And kids at home without school is just impossible. There is no reward system. There is no announcement that the mom has done a good job. We don’t even know what a good job is.

So in the middle of realizing that school is really just a babysitting service, I became militant. I realized that public school is like Social Security. There is no money to do what we are pretending we are aiming to do. We should just grow up and admit that we cannot have effective public schools for everyone.  Just like we cannot have Social Security for everyone.

But parents in the middle class can have one parent working and one parent home with their kids.

I feel like I have no choice. Because while I was waiting for the kids to go back to school, I was reading. And, of course, now my homeschool site makes me a magnet for research about school. And the evidence is overwhelming that schools are not meeting the educational needs of children:

• Unstructured play is more important than everything else for young kids.
• Test scores are not important.
• The homeschool trend is huge among educated parents.
• Passion-based learning is an impossible goal with 30 kids and one teacher. 
• Almost all serious talk of school reform is about redefining what school is.

I challenge you to read these links and tell me you don’t think homeschool would be better for your kids. And this is why I tell myself that I have to make homeschooling work.

Believe me. There is absolutely no evidence that middle class kids from college-educated parents should be sitting in a classroom. Find me some. Really. Put it in the comments. Because if I could have found some, my kids would be in a classroom today.

But you know what? I can’t figure out how to get my work done and do homeschool too. I can’t figure out: Should I work more to pay for more childcare so I can work more? I know I don’t want the pressure of trying to have a big job and be a mom. I want to be a mom and I want to have an interesting job. And, I guess, I want to figure out how much more I have to work in order to pay for somehow getting a break from the kids.

I feel so bad writing that.  A break from the kids. But that’s what sending kids to school is. Giving the parents a break. So I guess I’m still doing that. I’m still planning to get some sort of break.  I’m just not calling it school.

Last week, all I could think of for my break was shopping at Forever 21. And I am hopeful that maybe it counted as homeschooling, too.

So I spend my days writing career advice and reading about goats and figuring out how to make enough unleavened desserts to keep the Farmer from hating Passover. When I need a break from thinking, I plant my vegetables in perfectly straight rows and hope for no more snow.

The thing is, though, that it is not my nature to be sunny and bright.

Now there's a study to support my instincts toward stress and anxiety. According to Leslie Martin, author of the new book, The Longevity Project, stress and anxiety that arise from working hard at something that is engaging and exciting to you is actually a more healthy way to live than in a regular state of cheerfulness.

There’s a lot of talk about happiness, and how to get it. Of course, I obsess about it on my blog, but, to be clear, I had decided happiness is lame, and we should not be trying to get it.

Fortunately, I don’t think other people are really looking for happiness either. For example, there is an insane cover story in Psychology Today billed as Four Secrets of Happy Families.

One overachiever NYC family in the article has a daughter so obsessed with gymnastics that she practices every day after school while her mom drives to New Haven each week to teach at Yale. Seriously, this is a happy family? I don’t think so. I think this is a family full of people who are engaged and passionate about their own stuff. There are scheduling conflicts all week. Family dinners once a week are an accomplishment.

The thing is that I don't think it matters. As a society, we are not actually all that interested in happiness. If we were, people would stop relocating for jobs, people would stop eating french fries, and people would stop scheduling their kids for activities that happen close to dinnertime. If anything, I think people are focused on hiding the fact that they desperately want more money and more passion in their lives even though it's not fashionable to admit it.

And all the research about how money doesn’t buy happiness: I think get it, but we are unable to act on the news because we are programmed to want THINGS and money buys things. If we were satisfied with what we had, in cavemen times, we'd die as soon as there was a food shortage. Cavepeople always needed to feel like they needed more more more no matter how much they had in order to survive dry spells. So we can intellectually know that money doesn't make us happier, but it doesn't change our DNA. Embedded in our DNA is the sense that we always need to earn 15% more than we are currently earning.

So here’s the research: You earn 15% more and then you hang out with people a little richer, and then you don’t feel as rich because rich is relative, and then you get that semi-rational urge to earn more money again. We can’t help it.

This conundrum reminds me of how we know that hot women are not better in bed, confident women are better in bed. But it doesn't stop men who are looking for a one-night stand to try hardest for the hottest girl.

So you might wonder, are you really happy and you just don’t know it? The answer is no. And that’s good news. Because look, the Longevity Project says you’d be closer to dead if you were closer to happy.

I am not sure why we are even talking about happiness when Sonia Lyubomirsky shows that 2/3 of our happiness level is predetermined by our genes. If you are an optimist you are more happy, if you are a pessimist you are less happy. It's a spectrum. You can work hard to change that last third, but instead, why not work hard to find what you are passionate about?

Which is why I don’t feel settled on the farm. I keep looking around for the next thing I’m going to do that’s going to disrupt things. I’m passionate about disruptions, because when you find a new way to think about something you thought was true, that’s disruptive and interesting.

Like, I’m thinking maybe it won’t be so bad if my goats eat my vegetables, because then I’ll have an interesting problem to solve. I read a blog that said I can keep goats from eating something by spraying their pee on it. The idea of spraying my spinach with goat pee does not make me happy, but that it might work is fascinating to me.

Photo by Melissa Sconyers.

I love Stephanie because she is fun to talk to if I feel like talking and she leaves me alone if I feel like sending emails on my iPhone while she waxes. Or taking pictures.

I love the feeling of being neat and tidy after waxing. Because I feel like if my body is neat and tidy then my life is neat and tidy. Which is, of course, not true. I’m not sure anyone’s life is neat and tidy. But I like the idea that I can buy the illusion that I have things pulled together.

The problem is that waxing is expensive, and it’s a recurring expense. And I’m working on keeping my expenses very low so that I can start another company. Because  a startup is really difficult to keep funded, and if you are supporting a family on a startup salary, it’s very scary.

But I keep feeling I’ve already cut as much as spending as I can. Does everyone feel that way?

But look, I moved from NYC to a farm. There are no stores here so I have to go to eBay at 2am for something to qualify as an impulse buy. There are no avenues for splurging on spoiled children beyond buying an extra dog or donkey. But still I find avenues to extravagances that I hate giving up.

It’s hard to be a grown up. It’s hard to give up stuff I really like buying. I feel like all budgeting advice is like all career advice: Be a grown up and make hard choices. If you want to have a stable income then you can’t launch your own exciting new company every five years. If you want to live in NYC then you have to do a job that earns a lot of money. I accept these tradeoffs very well for careers, and then I bitch to people who don’t do as well as I do in the making-choices department.

But when it comes to buying things, I’m not that good. I bought my son a two-thousand-dollar violin even when I didn’t really have enough money. I wanted him to have a good violin because he works so hard during practice.

In my head the violin is like the waxing. I get fixated on needing it.

Some of you will judge the violin as extravagant. Others of you will say the violin is fine but the $200 knife was absurd. I felt like I had to buy it, though, because I cook meat every day and we don’t have a good knife for slicing.

It’s easy to judge other peoples’ spending because if you don’t have an emotional connection to someone else’s purchase, it looks like a lame obsession. For example, I rarely go out to dinner. Maybe once every three months.  So your dinners look extravagant to me.

I’m a girl of action, though. And I like a list of goals. So here are five ideas that have helped me to cut down on my spending:

1. Buying luxury items makes us mean.
When we are thinking about luxury items, we are less likely to be considerate of other peoples’ feelings, according to Roy Chua, from Harvard Business School.  He says this research gives companies reason to decrease spending on Jets and high-end client entertainment. I think this research also shows why I actually make my life worse by even considering the $10,000 oven that I’ve coveting. (And to make you a better person, I am not providing a link or a photo of it because it will adversely affect your empathy.)

2. Creating money problems leads to divorce.
A couples therapist told me the top three causes of divorce are money, sex, and in-laws. This makes sense to me. If nothing else, entrepreneurs have a very high rate of divorce, and entrepreneurs have routine money problems, and I know you know that I am not above using a syllogism to prove a point. But there is backstory to those causes of divorce: Really, the cause of divorce, every time, is lack of self-knowledge and self-regulation. The money, sex, in-law stuff are just visible symptoms of the invisible emotional problems. What this tells me is that if I don’t get a handle on the emotions that drive my spending then I will not have a handle on the emotions that keep a marriage together.

3. Catalogs are evil.
When I moved from NYC to Madison, WI, I was shocked that the only billboard ads were for Budweiser. I knew that moving the farm would make me totally out of touch with advertising messages, and, therefore, with American culture. So I spent a day subscribing to all the catalogs I could find. Flash forward to me receiving five catalogs every day: I didn’t know there were cute little lamb butter molds until I saw them in a catalog. Pictured on a dinner table filled with love and good cheer and people who were not fat even though they ate butter. I wanted those butter molds. And everything else in the catalogs. So I throw out catalogs immediately. When I am feeling strong.

4. Spending less is better than earning more.
One reason I fail to curb my spending is that I'm great at earning money. I seem to have an endless ability to dream up one more way to get $10K really fast. But I never have a lot of money. My first tip-off that this is normal is the research from Richard Easterlin that everyone feels like they need to earn 15% more in order to feel financially secure, regardless of how much money they make. But here is more research to quell my earning habits: Sonia Lyubirmisky, psychologist at University of California, writes that the more money we earn the less we are able to enjoy small pleasures of life.

5. Having a lot of stuff is not cool.
The first thing about it not being cool is that we are in an economic meltdown, and even William and Kate are skimping on their honeymoon. Also, the more stuff you have, the more you reveal that you have a problem feeling loved, according to research from Margaret Clark, psychologist at Yale. (Which makes me feel emotionally superior to everyone that I have so few things in my house.)

But also, we know that buying experiences is more meaningful to us than buying things. Which is why I come back to Stephanie, time and again. Because I leave with no physical object, just that feeling that I can conquer the world.

This post is sponsored by Gap Promotion Code.

I would not have bought the book if it didn't match my house so well. More on that later.

I told Leo I thought it was BS that he is Mr. Minimalism and he moved to San Francisco. I told him that the biggest cultural shift for me from New York City to the farm is the surprise shift to extreme minimalism. So I am sure that his move to San Francisco means he is tossing in the minimalism towel.

Leo has great resources on his blog about leading a minimalist lifestyle. But I think minimalism is lifestyle porn. It's something that people think would be nice to dream about for their lives, but in fact, there is the dirty flip side to minimalism: It's scary boring, which, I think, is why Leo moved his family to San Francisco—to expand what's available to his kids.

I have thought often about the slippery slope from minimalism to boring even though I don’t write about my own minimalism issues that much. First of all, my own minimalism is totally accidental, so I didn’t even know I was a minimalist until recently. Second, I think a minimalist life is a product of many small decisions rather than a single big one. (For example, losing all my possessions to bed bugs.)

Plus, I discredit all straight men who do not have a wife or kids and claim to be minimalists. They are not minimalists, they are just bachelors, programmed over thousands of years to use sex to accumulate possessions rather than shopping.

And anyone who is doing minimalist experiments—like not buying anything for a year, stuff like that—isn’t really a minimalist. It’s like doing a dog trick. People clap, and then you go back to stealing from plates on the dinner table.

Sustainable minimalism requires a few things:

1.     A job that does not require a lot of face-to-face contact. (For face-to-face contact you need transportation, clothes, and stuff that makes you fit easily in the flow of a business work day.)

2.     Kids who are not exposed to a lot of advertising. My kids almost never ask to buy anything because they never see anything to buy. These same kids, living in NYC, asked for something in every window we walked by.

3.     A social circle of people who are minimalists. There is no point in getting rid of everything if you must also get rid of your friends. So if not having stuff interferes with relationships, I don’t see the point.

Finally, before I tell you about my own minimalism, let me say that it’s not that fun to talk about because people get defensive. Like, if I tell people I have never had a TV, they need to tell me about their own TV habits or lack thereof. But I don’t care. I don’t have a TV because I never had one as a kid. I just don’t understand the TV thing. It’s not a high-and-mighty cultural decision.

You have never met a minimalist like the farmer, before he met me. He didn’t have a phone, or Internet, or a car. He seldom left the farm, and he hadn’t bought clothes for himself in maybe a decade.  The result was extreme loneliness, and over-dependence on his parents, which were the only people who could make their way into such a closed-off life.

A lot of what we buy is stuff to facilitate connections. Like gifts, wine glasses, replacing a doorbell.

So, here’s what I do not have:

Anything that is not functional—no tsotchkes in the house, besides books.

Loose toys. Any toy on the floor I throw out. The kids are constantly asking me if I threw out something they are looking for. This will scar them for life.

I sometimes even throw out their books. Or mine, if they are a too ugly. I am starting to think of books as objects to look at.

I mean, I've already read them, and it's easy to read them on a Kindle or, if you want to hold them, use the library. So the books have to be nice to look at in my house. I think we can no longer say books are functional, so I want them to be beautiful or fun and now I see them as an extravagance. But it's not coincidence that the extravagance I allow myself is connected with exposure to new ideas.

On the farm it's easy to own very little. I don't miss it because we are on our own—no keeping up with the Jones. We have no blender, no microwave, no toaster oven. Our fridge is very small, and we have no kitchen cabinets because I didn’t want to fill them.

We each wear the same four or five outfits over and over again. If we haven’t worn something in a year, I throw it out.

If we bring something besides food into the house, we have to throw something out.

You’d be surprised how little you miss.

When I lived in NYC I felt a constant pressure to buy stuff. Keeping kids clothed like other kids, having birthday parties like other kids (great birthday party link here –thanks, Natt), having adult clothing like other adults. The reason you can spot a tourist in ten seconds in NYC is because people who don’t live in NYC don’t spend nearly the time and money that New Yorkers do on their appearance.

Life on the farm is slow. Very slow. No one here has an iPad. People don’t know who Jon Stewart is, they don’t know the difference between The New Yorker and New York magazine. The opportunities are very limited. I have to be very careful to make sure my kids understand the world beyond the farm.

So I’m not saying Leo’s move from Guam to San Francisco is bad. I get the reasoning. I just think it’s the antithesis of minimalism. I think that Leo’s latest book, in the wake of his move to San Francisco, is sort of an ode to what one gives up when one seeks out diversity, interestingness, and intellectual stimulation.

And I wonder, do we need a guide to minimalism, or do we need a guide to understanding where our own sweet spot is on the continuum between minimalism and interestingness?

Photos by Melissa Sconyers

Al's data, which is based on the careers of college graduates, is basically that the salary curve for most people in their 20s is very steep. Then it starts to flatten in the 30s, and then you get into the land of the 3% raise. In real dollars, those 3% raises are not actually raises, they are just keeping up with inflation.

The information is grim. But here are some things you can do with it:

1. Go where the men are. To be precise, pay tops out at age 38 for women ($61K) and age 45 for men ($95K). But the difference, according to PayScale data, is not due to unequal pay for equal work. Rather, the difference is that women choose lower paying careers, and women are more likely to take time out of the workforce for kids. So the first thing you can do to prevent your salary from flat-lining is choose a career that men dominate. But it’s not just about industry—it is also about influence. Stick to line-management positions rather than support roles. For example, skip human resources and go to supply chain management.

2. Rewrite your resume. If you’re at the beginning of your career, focus on accomplishments rather than responsibilities. This makes you look like you’re in a higher pay bracket so you will get larger salary increases. If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, cut anything that is more than 15 years old, including the date of your college graduation. Al says that there is no premium paid for two decades of experience because jobs change so quickly that long-gone experience is not particularly relevant.  And because age discrimination creates a sort of penalty for more than 15 years of experience. So just leave it off. (Good resume editing tips here, at Quint Careers.)

3. Be a lawyer. Have I ever given this advice before? I don’t think so. Even the American Bar Association reports that law school is a ripoff. But I’m open to counter-arguments—Al says that the only profession where your pay increases after 20 years is in law. Because laws change very slowly, especially procedural law, and so much of being a good lawyer is your on-the-job training.

4. Specialize. By your mid 30s, if you don’t have a specialty, it’s hard to get your salary into the next bracket. You earn more money if your talents are more scarce. (Here’s some information about how to specialize.) Also, don’t give up hope if you have no idea what you’re doing in your mid-20s. As long as you figure things out by the time you’re 30, you will get a premium for 15 years of experience before your salary stops rising.

5. Buy a house assuming you won’t get a raise. Ever. When it comes to houses in the U.S., the average age of a first-time buyer is 33. So people go through their 20s gaining super-high raises, and then people buy a house in their mid-30s with the assumption that the raises will continue. In fact, though, you should buy a house preparing for your real income to remain unchanged until age 55, when it is likely to go down.

6. Recognize your limitations. People eventually start to realize that they are not going to get to the very top. They see that only one out of 100 web designers is the director, and only one out of 50 directors is a VP. Al calls this the funnel effect, and he says many people recognize this and start to trade time for money; people see that chasing the increasingly smaller raises is not as fulfilling as doing a wide range of other things with their time.

7. Focus on maintenance. Most people in their 40s have a lot going on. Taking care of aging parents, young kids, community organizations—all these jobs are falling on people in their 40s, which means it’s not a good time to be trying also to leverage one’s highest earning power. So instead of killing yourself trying to earn more and more, be realistic and go into maintenance mode.

One of the most common but least-talked about career moves is to get to a relatively high spot and then see how much you can cut back in terms of effort and still maintain that level of salary and/or prestige. This seems like a reasonable strategy for a wide range of people. So do small experiments with cutting back early in your career because creating enormous efficiencies takes practice. And a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic is not the training you need for this type of change.

Right now, a trending topic is “Volkswagen commercial” which is about their new Super Bowl commercial. Volkswagen has conveniently released the commercial early so we don’t have to spend this Sunday watching men giving each other concussions to see it.

Here’s the commercial:

This makes me happy to be part of Generation X. First of all, this is the small window of time when Generation X will have the largest buying power in the consumer market. We are at our highest earning power, which, admittedly, is not impressive, but earnings are all relative, and people are discriminating against the Baby Boomers because of their age, so it’s our heyday.

It’s also our heyday because Gen X values are front and center. And we’re about family. We don’t earn as much as Baby Boomers did because we work such fewer hours. We’ve downsized our careers to take care of our kids.  We’ve taken back the dignity of working part-time. We’ve deconstructed stay-at-home parenting as a respectful career alternative.

So I love this commercial because it captures the shared experience of Generation X. We like being home to make our kids peanut butter and jelly. You could not sell Baby Boomers with this. They think it’s lame to sit in a kitchen waiting for your kid to be hungry. We like having a male breadwinner and we’re not afraid to say it.

And we are surrounded by little boys in love with Star Wars.

When we look back, we will see that Gen X redefined family and work. We are the first generation that gave women a choice to do anything they want. So we’re the generation that reveals that what women really want is to be with their kids. Maybe not all the time. But more than men. That’s for sure.

The woman in the kitchen is not glamorous. She’s efficient, self-confident, and she knows what her child needs. She looks like she was vice-president-of-something before she had kids. And she appears to have managed to keep a marriage together, which is something Generation X works harder at than their parents did. (The divorce rate for college-educated white women is now less than 2%.)

The moment at the end of the commercial is so intimate. The father knows his son so well that he can participate in the Darth Vader game that he hasn’t even been home to see unfolding. And as a husband he can talk to his wife with a raise of an eyebrow.

The family has a car that is not too expensive, but it does the job. That’s what I want from my life: Intimate, fun, and not too expensive. God bless Volkswagen.

I was talking with Leo Babauta about minimalism. Well, actually, we were talking about his new book, and his minimalist process of promoting it, which I will now contribute to with this link.

It's ironic to me that Leo, the king of minimalism, just moved his family from Guam to San Francisco, and I, the queen of interestingness, moved my family from NYC to a farm. It's ironic because the farm is forced minimalism: There are no restaurants, no stores beyond the very basics, nowhere to wear nice clothes, and traveling anywhere is difficult. It's a sort of forced minimalism. We wear the same four outfits all week, I cook three meals a day and we eat them together, and because we don't have a TV, we are rarely exposed to advertising, telling us we need something.

Leo, on the other hand, moved to San Francisco to give his kids more opportunities, expose his kids to more things. In the process of that, Leo needs to earn more money, he needs to keep track of a more complicated family schedule (because there's more to do) and he deals with the inherently complicated world of living in a city full of choices.

To live on a farm, I gave up New York City, where I was already on an accidental path to minimalism. But now, on the farm, where I truly understand what minimalism is like, I know you're not really doing it until you start worrying that your life does not have enough inputs.

I know I don't want to live in a big city because the pressure it puts on one's career—you always have to have a great way to make money—is not in line with me constantly adjusting my career to fit what I want from my life. Career change is very very hard with a high family burn rate. And keeping a low family burn rate is all relative. (All financial well being is relative.) The farm family burn rate is relatively zero compared to a NYC or SF family burn rate.

So we were walking down Fifth Avenue when my five-year-old announced that he has to go to the bathroom. Public bathrooms in New York are notoriously elusive. You really have to know the ins and outs to be able to find one. My son saw me struggling and he pointed to the Plaza Hotel: "I could just pee in the trees in the front yard of that building."

We went to Trump Plaza. The line was insane, and I felt like even though it was only my first day back in NYC, I was going to get claustrophobia.

By the second day, I was done with the crowds. I couldn't take it. So I got my son a haircut. The woman who cut my son's hair brought her own son to work with her that day. And both boys realized they had Pokemon on their DSi's. So they played together for an hour.

It was a New York City day that made me happy. My son made a friend, and I read magazines while they played.

So I question whether I really want interesting. Or what an interesting life means to me. Because I have only about a day's tolerance for New York City. And the minimalism of the farm actually comes easy to me. I want nothing around me because my head is so cluttered and spinning.

Still, I worry that maybe someone like Leo won't even talk with me if I'm not interesting. And I worry that Muriel Spark abandoned her son. Did you know that? She was such a great writer; she understands the female psyche so well. But in order to craft that life of a writer she disowned her son as an unnecessary distraction.

What is interesting to her? I'm not sure. And I'd be lying if I told you that my sons don't distract me. They do. For example, at ABC Home I wanted to soak up all the interior design ideas that are floating around the store. So I told my son to just sit down and play his DS. "Don't talk to anyone," I told him.

"What if a homeless person asks me for money?"

He is fascinated by the homeless people. I think he likes that he can help a grownup.

"Don't give money when you're not with me," I tell him. "And if someone wants you to go with them…"

"I know, I know," he says, "Kick and scream and if they tell me to be quiet then I scream louder."

So I leave him in a corner, absorbed in his DS.

And I don't know if I'm getting ideas for what I can do with my house, or I'm getting an appreciation for the fact that really, there is very little in my house, and I like it that way.

I leased a BMW when it was clear that that mattered when it came to making deals in LA. I hired a stylist when I realized my clothes were holding me back in NYC. In Madison I have tons of household help so my kids don’t have a crazy schedule because of my work schedule.

I am convinced that frugality is a key quality for a successful career.  Here is why frugality helps your career:

1. Spending money is generally a distraction.
We know this. That people use it as therapy. People use it to fill holes they perceive in their lives. But the psychic energy it takes to spend money actually distracts us from what matters to us. Pay Pal reports that people wish their significant other would spend less money on Valentine’s Day. This encapsulates the whole problem to me.

2. Spending money is a vehicle for overcommitting.
The biggest example of this is graduate school.  The people who do best in a bad economy are those who are flexible about the types of jobs they can take and the types of careers they can move into, according to Philip Oreopoulos, professor of economics at University of Toronto. This flexibility is specifically limited if you go to graduate school – you commit two, three, four years to a given career whether or not it’s going to pan out for you in the long run. And you commit to paying back school loans, which means you need to take a job that earns enough to pay those loans.

3. Spending money limits possibilities.
If you invest in an expensive bicycle because you’re going to do triathlons then you limit your ability to take off more time from work to actually train for the triathlon. In most cases, renting a house is better for you than buying one: If you buy a house, you cannot easily downsize, you cannot as easily relocate, and you end up limiting your earning power. (That link is to my brother's blog. This is dinner table conversation in my family.)

4. Entrepreneurship is a safety net if you're frugal in your home life.
Careers today are unstable, and while companies used to provide safety nets for employees, today we have to create our own safety nets. The best way to do that is with entrepreneurship. But starting your own company is nearly impossible if you have high income requirements. Startups don’t provide high incomes at the beginning.

As I write this, I think about my friends who spend a lot more money than I do. I have friends with really nice houses, friends who take super fun vacations, and I have friends who would not be caught dead in the clothes I wear to work (for example, plastic rain boots because I don’t want to pay for snow boots.)

My friends would say there’s a compromise: You don't need to invest everything in your career. You don’t need to give up all the creature comforts of life. You can still have a good situation with both.

Maybe it’s my obsessive nature. I’m willing to make extreme tradeoffs. I wrote earlier about wanting to be an expert. About how it takes a singular, daily focus. And I think I have had that with writing. But in order to do it, I have given up a lot. I’m not sure if that’s right.

Do we hear about Mozart playing kickball? I know, there wasn’t kickball. But if there had been, he wouldn’t have played it. Because you give up stuff.

So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality. It’s the recognition that spending money is actually a distraction from the passion at hand. So the less you spend, the less you’re distracted.