I originally posted this as a comment here and thought I’d keep a copy of it on this blog.

Here is an interesting thought: a salary is an insurance that guarantees you a regular payment in exchange for a potentially higher payoff. When you work for someone, they bare the risk of making or breaking deals with clients and customers, and those customers pay your employer lots of money, much more money than you’ll get as the employee who did the actual work. The customers are willing to pay that much because your work is worth it to them, but you’ve traded the potential of doing work directly with that customer and getting lots more money for the insurance of a regular predictable income. So even if there is no work to do, as part of providing you the insurance, your employer or “insurer” still has to pay you.

Certainty is valuable, you pay for it when you work for someone else by forgoing potentially more money for the certainty of a regular paycheck. It’s the same with being at uni and jumping through hoops to get a degree. If you do well, at the end of it, you can be pretty certain that it’ll get you further than if you just dropped out, tried a bunch of things and failed. You pay for this insurance with your time and money.