It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality. I am not shaming people for wanting more money of course, but after a certain threshold, framing it as an external necessity is dishonest.
It is a metaphor that they are still working class. You can earn 500k-1M/year in salary and be working class. Your monthly expenses may be > than your salary and you need it to keep working to get at the same QOL.
I live in an exurb of DC, in one of the highest cost of living areas with one of the highest median income in the world.
I have 3 kids who are all in middle and early high school (the most expensive time) and a mortgage and literally just did the math on what my MINIMUM income would need to be in order to maintain a extremely comfortable lifestyle and it’s between $80-100k a year.
Anyone making more than ~100k a year isn’t living paycheck to paycheck unless they are spending way more than their means - which is actually most people
What reality do you live in?
I'm a software engineer with Google on my resume (among others); my wife is a software engineer in the chipmaking industry; we both have PhDs and work in Silicon Valley, and have no children.
We work because we have bills to pay. We can't afford to not work. Our largest expenses are still housing, groceries, transportation, medical, etc. - i.e., bills.
We are paying a mortgage on a 3B townhouse, which is also our home office, and where my mother-in-law is living too as a war refugee from Kyiv, Ukraine. I'm helping my mother with her bills too (she's renting a studio in San Diego).
When I don't work, our savings start draining.
It would be nice to get to the point where paying the bills is not something I ever think about. But we haven't reached that threshold.
Neither have most of our friends (also engineers with PhDs). I haven't spoken to my friend in OpenAI in a while, so I hope they've crossed that threshold; but it's not something I know for sure.