+
More

A banker said millionaire CEOs 'literally weep' due to stress, and Twitter users pounced.

A banker said millionaire CEOs 'literally weep' due to stress, and Twitter users pounced.

A former bank boss tried to justify inflated CEO salaries because the job is stressful. The people of Twitter were not having it.

There's no doubt that running a company is a tough job. Holding the fate of hundreds or thousands of employees and the weight of success or failure of a business on your shoulders is definitely a big source of stress.

But how much more valuable is one person's stress than another?


That's the question Dr. David Morgan, former CEO of Australia's Westpac Banking Corporation, inadvertently addressed in an interview for a new biography. According to The Age, Morgan told the book's author, Oliver Brown, that the reality of CEO life is "seldom openly discussed."

"Most people don't talk about it honestly," Morgan said. "Yes, CEO life is very glamorous. You're recognized, you're given the best seats in restaurants, and you're ridiculously overpaid. But you need stamina. As the leader, you rarely play the grand final, but more an endless succession of semi-finals."

"You can hardly ever relax, and that creates intense strain," he added. "Behind closed doors, some CEOs literally weep."

And that was the straw that broke Twitter's back.

People who have 'literally wept' over stress at jobs where they made under $40K a year showed up by the thousands.

Dr. Morgan was the CEO of Westpac from 1999 to 2008. In 2007, his annual pay topped $10 million. That's $833,000 a month, $192,000+ a week, or assuming a 7-day work week, $27,000+ per day. If he worked 16-hour days every single day (which is surely not the norm, but let's go with it for the sake of the stressful argument), that's $1,700+ per hour.

But sometimes they weep in private, right?

At least Morgan admitted that CEOs can be "ridiculously overpaid." But trying to justify that with multimillionaire tears totally falls flat for the multimillions of people who work in stressful, underpaid jobs every day.

Twitter user Frankie Zelnick illustrated this point with a simple tweet in response to The Age's article share.

"Raise your hand if you've 'literally wept' from stress at a job that paid you less than 40 grand a year," she wrote.

The responses rolled in like thunder.

There is zero evidence that the more stress you have in a job, the more you get paid. In fact, as several people pointed out, the less they got paid at a job, the more they cried.

An entire thread could have been dedicated to the pay/tears ratio of teachers.

Unless you have tried to educate a classroom full of kids, it's hard to understand the amount of stress that goes along with the job. I started out as a teacher and while it's a rewarding career in many ways, it's also the hardest job I've ever had—and one of the worst paid per actual working hour. Every teacher I know has "literally wept" over their jobs, many while working other jobs to make ends meet.

What stressed out millionaires don't recognize is how much stress is caused by not having financial security.

Some users shared stories of how they couldn't afford to take time off work, even for medical reasons.

Others pointed out the ocean of difference between crying over a stressful job when you have more than enough money and crying over a stressful job when you're poor. There's just no comparison.

When your work includes business meetings over rounds of golf and tables at 5-star restaurants, followed up by going home to a luxurious house that you can afford to pay someone to clean, and a retirement account worth more than most of us will make in our whole lifetimes, it's hard to feel sorry for you, no matter how hard your job is.

Running a company is stressful, but so are millions of other people's jobs that pay a tiny fraction of what most CEOs make—and without the perks. Dr. Morgan easily could have retired in comfort after his 9-year stint as Westpac's CEO. Most of us have to work our butts off for our entire adult life to be able to stop working and still have food on the table.

So yeah. We know CEOs have tough jobs, but the teachers, social workers, non-profit employees, retail associates, and other underpaid, overstressed workers aren't going to lose any sleep over anyone's $1,000+/hr tears.

Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

18-year-old took her college savings and bought the restaurant where she was a dishwasher

Samantha Frye, the newest owner of Rosalie's restaurant, is proving there's more than one way to invest in your future.

Canva

There are many way to invest in your future

Eighteen year old Samantha Frye has traded college life for entrepreneurship, and she has no regrets.

Frye began working at Rosalie's Restaurant in Strasburg, Ohio at 16 as a dishwasher, working up the ranks as a kitchen prep, server, then line cook. All while working a second job, sometimes third job.

After graduating high school, Frye started college at Ohio State with plans of studying business or environmental engineering. But when she came back to work a shift at Rosalie’s for winter break, an opportunity arose—the owners had planned to sell the restaurant.
Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
@Steve_Perrault/Twitter

Some moments never get old.

On November 19, 1999, a man named John Carpenter made game show history and quite possibly gave us all the greatest game show moment of all time.

Carpenter was a contestant on the very first season of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” shot in America. Hosted by the late Regis Philbin, the quiz show featured three "lifeline" options to help them with difficult questions, the most popular being able to “Phone-a-Friend.”

Carpenter had impressively not used a single lifeline for any of his questions. That is, until question 15. The million-dollar question, to be exact.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less