The Inconveniences of a Large Pay Cheque
- HO Seng Chee
- Aug 29
- 3 min read
Everyone wants a bigger pay cheque. But nobody warns you that as you make the numbers, the numbers will start playing you. Don't believe me? Read on.
1. You become the office ruler (the measuring kind)
Every pay increase comes with a gift: colleagues silently recalculating your worth against theirs. You didn't earn respect. You earned more scrutiny. And once you become the one to beat, you're also the one who can't be seen slipping. Miss a deadline when you're mid-level? It just happened to be a rough week. Miss one when you're the highest-paid person in the room? It's flagged as a key man risk, typically by people who've never had a deadline that mattered.
2. You believe life must be hard
"If it were easy, surely they wouldn't pay me this much," you start telling yourself. The number begins to justify your torment, and the torment becomes proof you've earned the number. That's the logic, airtight and self-contained, like a circular reference in an Excel sheet. You stop questioning the 3am texts, the missed family dinners, and the dread on Sunday nights. Because you decide there's a price to be paid for everything. Anything free - like a mid-day break outside in fresh air, or leaving the office before dark - feels suspicious and unearned. If a week goes by where nothing catches fire, you go looking for a fire.
3. You fall for scams - expensive ones, dressed up as taste
With every salary bump, your financial pain threshold subtly resets. It begins with a $28 avocado toast becoming "just brunch." You graduate next to the caviar breakfast. Before long, you're at a Michelin-starred restaurant paying $1,000 for a limited-time seasonal menu, nodding solemnly as a nineteen-year-old server explains how the potato has been "reimagined." Remember the 2000s, when every dish came with a smear of flavoured foam, and everyone just went along with it? That was an entire industry testing how far they could stretch your financial pain limits, and discovering the answer was "a lot farther than we thought."
4. You follow Marie Kondo
You acquire nice things, then decide clutter is your problem. You buy Kondo's book. You do the thing where you hug a sweater and ask if it "sparks joy." You thank three of your five Scotty Cameron putters for their service and let them go. The Rimowa trunks follow. For about a week, you feel lightened. And then, at some charity auction, you raise your paddle for that hand-made Byron Morgan. Shortly after, Moynat travel gear begins appearing in your social media feed. You click. As it turns out, saying goodbye to your old toys is not decluttering, but merely a first-world ritual for more possessions. The problem is never clutter; the problem is your large pay cheque.
5. You price everything against your hourly rate
Once you know what your time is technically worth, you can't unknow it. The maths is always running in your head, like Siri snooping in on every conversation. Hang that painting yourself? That's $140 of opportunity cost for something job sites price at $60. Cook dinner? Same skewed economics. You delegate home DIY, the errands, the dinner - anything with a market rate gets outsourced on principle. If sleep were available as a service, performable by cheaper help while you did something "more valuable," you'd absolutely sign up. "I'm optimising," you tell yourself.
6. You become a limp biscuit, the executive version of meh
You become polite. Synthetically polite. You nod along to bad ideas because disagreeing requires more effort than it's worth. You laugh, generously, at jokes that are not funny, told by people whose approvals you don't even need. You say "totally fair point" to points that are not fair. Many are not even points. As your pay rises, your sense of humour craters. That acerbic mind of yours - what made you you - goes soft at the edges, then soft all the way through, like a biscuit left too long in tea. You spent years working hard to finally be able to say whatever you want, only to find you can't risk having an opinion. You become agreeable, like beige paint on a hospital wall.
The greatest inconvenience
Still not convinced? Well how about this final spoiler - a large pay cheque is in fact proof that you haven't made it at all. Because truly wealthy people don't have a salary. They don't work; they have money that works for them.
A large pay cheque is not freedom. It's a leash - and you show up every day to collect payment on it, scam-fleeced, biscuit-soft, and Kondo'd into oblivion.
"Sweet is the sleep of labourers, whether they eat little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will not let them sleep." - Ecclesiastes 5:12
*I am a leadership coach. I help leaders avoid the inconveniences of their large pay cheques.
