I find the whole economic system to be quite bizarre. Nobody's salary seems to correlate with much except their skill at getting a high salary. For instance, my sister (elementary education) makes even less than I do as a grad student. The difference is that she wakes up at 5:00 AM and works all day teaching and taking care of little kids until 7:00 PM, whereas I wake up whenever I feel like it, head to a coffee shop and work on research (which is basically a computer game for me), and mix in bike rides and whatever else as I please. The difference in salary will be even more extreme once I get my PhD.<p>It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.<p>Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company (<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees-that-stay-in-companies-longer-than-2-years-get-paid-50-less/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...</a>).<p>I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.<p>Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.