THE WASHINGTON POST DISCOVERS THAT high paying jobs are boring too. Having spent a summer as an investment banking intern during a mad moment in business school when I imagined that I could somehow shoehorn my personality to fit the pathologically detail-oriented, hyper-competitive, number-hugging world of Wall Street, this was not news to me.

While I would not go so far as to say that proofreading pitch books and tweaking capital asset models is as boring as the year I spent working a cash register at the Love Pharmacy Chain (no, it was a perfectly respectable chain of drugstores, and no, I have no idea what was going through the head of the fellow in marketing who decided that “Love Pharmacies” would look good on the letterhead), investment banking was nonetheless considerably more boring than most of my other jobs, including (prior to business school) building the computer systems that the investment bankers used to tweak their models.

Part of this is, of course, that while I obtain moderate enjoyment from reading balance sheets, I don’t enjoy it enough to spend days on end speculating about whether retail growth in Disney’s Latin American markets will average 2.4% or 2.6% over the next three years.

But even my friends who live and breathe finance find a large portion of their work intensely boring. They are doing it because they hope that if they spend long enough proofreading powerpoint presentations and scrutinising IPO prospectuses, they will one day be paid really gargantuan sums of money to fly all over the world and tell CEO’s how to finance their companies. This job is so fun and exciting that most of the people who do it retire by 50. But until they reach that halcyon horizon (and, with banking’s military-inspired “up or out” model, only a small fraction of freshly-minted MBA banker larvae will ever get to that level) most of them are bored for much of the time.

There is a tendency among liberal arts types to think that it is grossly unfair that investment bankers make so much money, when said artsy type’s clearly more socially valuable work is so pitifully renumerated. Having spent a summer doing it, I personally think that anyone who is willing to spend his Saturday night going over the fine print in an SEC prospectus until 2 am is welcome to all the filthy lucre they will pay him. I chose to become a journalist because I’ve only got forty or fifty years left on this planet, and if I’m going to spend the majority of my waking hours doing something, I’d rather do something I feel is worthwhile than something that will buy me a cushy place to sleep. It seems downright piggy for those of us with what my mother calls “English Major Jobs” to demand both fulfilling work and lavish renumeration.