Is That $200,000 Salary Really Making You Rich?

$200,000. That is what a newly-qualified associate at a US law firm in New York can now expect to earn. In London, it's £160,000. A figure large enough to silence family friends, delight parents, and earn respectful nods at dinner parties.

But here is the catch: you will barely attend those dinner parties. Outside of weddings and funerals, you will seldom see the very people most impressed by your success. Because while the salary looks grand on paper, the life that earns it is far smaller than you might imagine.

Let us complete the arithmetic your recruitment partner conveniently left out. Many associates bill over 2,000 hours annually-and that is just what gets logged. Add unbilled time, admin, business development, and commuting, and you are looking at 75-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year. That is 3,750 hours. Divide your $200,000 by actual time worked, and you are earning roughly $53 per hour. Respectable, certainly. But hardly the windfall that headline figure suggests.

More troubling still: you are spending prime years of life-the years of health, energy, and possibility-chained to a screen, accumulating hours that your future self may struggle to remember, let alone savour.

Some might say that is the deal. You knew what you signed up for. There is an apprenticeship dynamic here, after all-a rite of passage that delivers learning, reputation, and crucially, options. But here's the question few dare ask: when does the rite of passage end, and when does it become a life sentence?

I know a lawyer who earns north of £200,000 and has not touched her £13,000 Leica camera setup in months. As a student, owning such equipment seemed like the ultimate symbol-proof you had made it, proof you could afford the tools that serious artists coveted. Now it gathers dust, a monument to dreams deferred.

This pattern repeats everywhere. Watch how young professionals spend their first substantial earnings. They gravitate toward beautiful, expensive objects in categories they once loved but no longer have time to pursue. The photography enthusiast buys professional cameras they never use. The fitness lover joins exclusive gyms they rarely visit. These purchases are not mere consumption-they are emotional insurance policies, promises to former selves that the sacrifice has meaning.

But here is the trap: instead of becoming pathways back to abandoned interests, these objects become substitutes for them. The expensive camera does not make you a photographer any more than the unused gym membership makes you fit.

The danger compounds over time. Salaries creep upward, golden handcuffs tighten, lifestyle inflation sets in. What began as a temporary trade-off hardens into permanent architecture. Years blur past in a parade of late nights, missed birthdays, and half-lived weekends.

Not everyone will recognize themselves in this picture, and that is fine. Some lawyers genuinely thrive in high-octane environments. The training years do offer real value-professional education, entry into a trusted guild, hard-earned competence. But for many, the question becomes whether they can use those early years strategically-to learn, to earn, and then to pivot toward something more sustainable.

The lawyers I most admire managed exactly this transition. They leveraged their early experience to move in-house, into government, or into portfolio careers that offered better integration between work and life. They understood that true wealth is not just about accumulating money-it is about accumulating days you actually own.

So is a lawyer's salary "worth it"? That depends entirely on what you plan to purchase with it. If you are buying time to build something better, it may be the best investment you ever make. But if you are simply working to afford the things that compensate for working, no salary will ever be large enough to buy back what you have surrendered.

The arithmetic, it turns out, is more complex than anyone mentions in those recruitment presentations.