You may have noticed that my posting frequency has become increasingly less….frequent. Yeah, that’s pretty much due to grad school. For those of you who don’t remember (which is totally understandable due to aforementioned infrequent posting), I’m slowly working my way through a Master of Social Work (MSW) program. It’s great, but in real terms it means I write at least one 5-8 page paper every week. Doesn’t leave much in the writing tank, yet I still have a longing to keep writing here when I can. I actually enjoy writing the papers; it’s nice to have some direction, and what I’m learning is totally intriguing. But there are still some other things I want to talk about which are way out of coursework land.
One of them is this social work thing, and how it could benefit from the FIRE world.
I’ve known plenty of social workers over the years. Used to work with them frequently when I was on the job. Begged them to come remove kids from fucking scary situations. People call 911 when shit goes sideways, and I was the guy who showed up. Mostly so I could either throw someone in jail, and then call other peeps to help clean it all up. Like, who do cops call when the mom’s OD’d on the floor, dad’s stabbed in the face, and there’s a 2 year old crawling around their bug infested apartment with no electricity and a single can of rancid food? Social workers. Repeated stuff like that led me to shortly date one who worked CPS. Many of my therapists were LCSWs. Went to Mexico on a work exchange with another one who worked for our PD doing solid domestic violence work. Fun fact, she was the one who shared a FIRE related article on raptitude.com, which has thus led to me being FI or whatever.
Full fucking circle, man.
Anyways, I was always on the outside of the social work world. They did their thing, I punched people in the face. But now I’m sorta on the inside. On one hand, the profession is light years ahead of my previous jobs. They have like, national institutions which share research and put out best practices, which directly influence initial and continuing education. Much of their practices are based on peer-reviewed research. We sure didn’t do that shit where I come from, thus leading to the repetition of lethal mistakes years after some other place had figured out a better way. Disconnected silos and shit.
But alas, nothing is perfect, and the social work field has its own level of fuckery.
The main one is this “self-care” thing. We used to not do this either as cops. Self care was heavy drinking and strip clubs. That’s still out there, but now it’s creeping more towards “go to therapy even if you don’t feel like you need it, live healthy, and for fucks sake-take every second of time off you’ve earned”. Possibly due to the patriarchy and the highly female dominated nature of the field, social work never got to go through the whiskey and stripper phase, which luckily robbed them of blundering into national level crises like beating and murdering people on TV, but also kept from forcing the field into some hard truths about how stupid they’ve been.
Social workers, like cops, care about people, and see a lot of fucked up shit. They also adopted the slow burning maladaptive coping mechanism of working themselves to burnout, and since the field has some weird stigma against thinking about money, many do all of the stupid shit you can do with said green stuff. This money stress feeds into the burnout, and you’ve got a pretty predictable level of social workers being miserable, feeling trapped, and hating their life.
Having seen this now, and being in social work classes and discussions where this stigma around money is perpetuated, I keep want to yell into the void “Like fucking read Your Money or Your Life you stupid hippies!!”. But of course that’s not going to work. So I wrote this blog post instead.
Stigma.
Social workers are frequently told that the profession is “about the outcome, not the income”. Their code of ethics even says they have to essentially do pro bono work or suffer group shaming. That’s fine and all. I’m totally onboard; I’ve got a few million bucks so I can afford to do shit for free. But telling that to a social worker with $80k+ of grad school loan debt making $45k a year seems like an asshole thing to do.
Then there’s capitalism. Social work is partially a study of systems, and how human systems can intentionally or unintentionally fuck over certain people. Capitlism is examined, as is how it’s totally fucked a bunch of people that social workers have to constantly try to pull out of the gutter. This is totally a thing; saw this when I was working my last job. Noel does some great writing about it over at happily disengaged. Unfortunately, social work’s focus on the evils of capitalism creates the message that anything associated with making money is super bad, and if you try to make more money you’re some dickhead elite trodding on the masses. This leads to an allergy to thinking about money, so many social workers do the totally american thing of spending whatever based on feels and having no idea how much is going out or coming in. You can guess where this leads; more debt, more stress, more burnout.
Look, I agree. Our economic system seriously screws a lot of people over. It is far from perfect. (But hey, at least it’s not the worst one!). However, the only solution we’re given in the MSW program is to work to change our system so it quits fucking so many people. Basically protest, write opinion pieces, work in policy to help bring about change. Yeah, sure. Sounds great. But what the hell is that debt laden social worker making shit money supposed to do about the dumpsterfire that is their life while we’re all waiting on the world to change? Hear a whole lot of crickets when that gets asked in class.
Luckily there are some badass social workers who are calling bullshit. They are doing the work to make it ok for social workers to be paid what they deserve. It’s a big step. But I worry, because as many of you FIRE friends know, more money doesn’t exactly mean less problems. Think some guy sang a highly accurate song about how the opposite generally occurs. Hedonic treadmill and all that. You know the deal. Unfortunately, social workers apparently do not. Hence, this: FI for Social Workers.
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