We get good at not seeing what we are seeing. The intimacies, obviously—the tampon wrapper in the bathroom trash, the medications lined up on the vanity—but also the belittling comments our bosses dish out, occasionally to each other but mostly to us. They would never speak this way before an audience, because they are good people, charitable and well-informed, and so we must fail to be that audience. We look down at our shoes. We scribble notes to ourselves and check email on our phones. Solidarity, we learn, is a kind of pride that will put a target on our backs. They are hard on the newbies, who must be vetted, but they’re ruthless with those of us who’ve earned their trust. Why don’t you just fire us? we wonder, but they are like babies or wild animals bred in captivity. They need us, so they punish us. Why don’t you just quit, we think, when one of us is in the crosshairs, but we know why we don’t. Some agreement we have made with ourselves, our spouses, our debtors. We promise to stick it out a little longer.

We stop seeing the dollar signs even though they are everywhere, like in a game on The Price Is Right. We don’t add it all up because the amounts would confound us. We begin to think in multiples of $50,000. We ask ourselves on their behalf, “Is this too much to spend?” But no, it is only a drop in the bucket. We’re like the frog in boiling water. We think it’s wrong for one family to hold this much wealth, but we want this job, too. We are terrified of losing it or leaving it or it leaving us, and our bosses know it. They know exactly how much to pay to keep us around. There is probably an equation, a sigma in a spreadsheet cell, that knows what number, year over year, we will say yes to instead of moving on, finishing our PhDs, writing our plays, starting our businesses. Or worse, moving back, back to tuna fish sandwiches and paying only the minimum balance (if at all) and wondering how we will survive.